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Cancer SUCKS

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  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    🕯praying
  • cgichard wrote: »
    @Galilit It could indeed be the vaccine - I don't think it has even been tested on immuno-compromised patients - so do please check with the relevant doctor a.s.a.p.

    I did ask my oncologist ... three times ... the first time he said what you said. Then a few weeks later he said it was ok. Then just before I went I confirmed it.
    I think it probably is that though ... thanks for the response.
    Having a very quiet day after my 3am panic ... everything is worse at 3am, isn't it?
    Indebted for your prayers, everyone

  • 3am should be banned. I see it most mornings (or, if not, it'll be 4am).

  • 🕯 Galilit, Mr Image, Graven Image, my sister R.
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    Prayers ascending for all the above.

    I'd be very surprised if they'd have given you the vaccine if they thought there was a chance of it doing you harm.
  • Piglet wrote: »
    I'd be very surprised if they'd have given you the vaccine if they thought there was a chance of it doing you harm.

    Unless, of course, "they" - the said doctors, - stood to gain, directly or indirectly, from boosting the numbers of patients receiving the vaccine. And why are pharmaceutical firms exempt from liability for side-effects or adverse reactions?
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    Yes, they gain from boosting the numbers getting the vaccine. They get to have their normal work back. A lot of them will never be the same, though. A lot of them are severely traumatized by what they've faced in the last 10 months.

    And shame on you for suggesting they'd willfully harm patients. I'm sure it wasn't fun for Galilit to get conflicting answers to the same question. But this is a NOVEL coronavirus. What medical people know or can safely recommend quite understandably changes.
  • cgichard wrote: »
    Piglet wrote: »
    I'd be very surprised if they'd have given you the vaccine if they thought there was a chance of it doing you harm.

    Unless, of course, "they" - the said doctors, - stood to gain, directly or indirectly, from boosting the numbers of patients receiving the vaccine. And why are pharmaceutical firms exempt from liability for side-effects or adverse reactions?

    UN-fucking-believable. Just wow.

  • GalilitGalilit Shipmate
    edited January 2021
    I did ask. Three times.
    I also looked it up last night on the interwebz thingy.

    Indeed, immuno-compromised people were not included in the initial trials (on the basis of which the Special Permission was granted). Fair enough. There were enough known unknowns floating around already.
    The vaccine has nothing to do with the virus itself. It's not a dead one or a weakened one. Those are both designed to stimulate the body's immune response by using the actual virus itself. The Vaccine is a whole different kind of revolutionary method. (mRNA).
    I just suffered because I am Weakened in General and, as I have experienced other times, there are tons of unusual and unpleasant things that happen to A Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Body which is immuno-compromised. 99% of them are regarded as "not clinically significant". Not to the cancer and not to the virus.
    Just Events in a body that's already out of equilibrium and struggling with Another New Thing.
    It's just a bit more frightening at 3am when you are already suffering from terminal cancer.

    Thanks for all your concern folks.
    I am much better now
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    edited January 2021
    Glad to hear you're feeling better. I totally agree about 3am. During a difficult time in my life I spent way too much time awake then. 3am is why my cat sleeps on my bed.
  • That's a very reasoned post in the circumstances, Galilit. In your position, *everything* may be experimental - there's no placebo in cancer drug trials, for example, because if you include a group with no dose you are just letting their cancer get on with it.

    Yes, taking the vaccine in your circumstances carries extra risk and may have side effects that people whose immune system hasn't been shagged probably won't experience - but there's much greater risk of the big-D side effect should you get Covid-19. Pity some other people don't get that...

  • Lisa has her chemo tomorrow. Please pray for her. I can't visit, hold her, I feel what I am, an old, sick man. It's difficult to pray. Lord, have mercy!
  • PatdysPatdys Shipmate
    Prayers for all, suffering and caring.
    And prayers for the health professionals caring as well.

    (and I have posted an invitation for cgrichard).
  • @RockyRoger, our prayers for Lisa are your prayers for her as well. May our Lord have mercy indeed on you both.
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    Rocky Roger, praying for you and Lisa.

    Years ago when I was too exhausted to pray for a situation I asked Shipmates to do so for me. Now it's my turn to do the praying for both of you.

    Patdys, praying for you and all medical people the world over. I have a doctor's appt next week and am hoping I will have some roses in bloom to take with me.
  • Strength and courage for Rocky Roger and Lisa
  • Praying for you as well as Lisa, @RockyRoger. Trying times.
  • Thank you all. I'm feeling a little better today, able to phone Lisa and encourage her.
  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    Praying for @RockyRoger, Lisa and all requests 🕯
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    For @Galilit

    For Lisa and @RockyRoger

    For all in need of prayer
  • For Lisa and RockyRoger and Galilit and for better 3ams for all.
  • NenyaNenya All Saints Host, Ecclesiantics & MW Host
    Praying for Lisa and @RockyRoger and @Galilit .

    Also @Patdys and all health workers who must be beyond the ends of their tethers.

    >votive<
  • I feel as if I have returned to myself today
    Thanks for all the thoughts, prayers and support.
    On we go ...
  • Continuing prayers @Galilit. Glad to know you are feeling a bit better.
  • Hurrah, @Galilit , long may it be so!
  • NenyaNenya All Saints Host, Ecclesiantics & MW Host
    That's good to know @Galilit .
  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    Excellent news!
  • PatdysPatdys Shipmate
    Ongoing care and prayer for all those impacted by the dreaded C’s.

    And a gentle hooray for feeling betterish.
  • A minor head-scratching tangent... My friend Dave has just had what looks like successful surgery for bladder cancer, and he's been told that part of the follow up treatment is a course of injections of a vaccine originally meant for TB. Happy for him, of course, but what kind of clinical accident leads to the discovery that something normally injected into your arm for one disease also works for something completely different when applied much farther south by a method that you probably don't want to discuss in polite company?
  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    That’s good news, @Patdys 🕯
  • I would guess someone with cancer was also being treated for TB and they noticed a minor improvement in the cancer so decided to up the dose to the cancer area.
  • A minor head-scratching tangent... My friend Dave has just had what looks like successful surgery for bladder cancer, and he's been told that part of the follow up treatment is a course of injections of a vaccine originally meant for TB. Happy for him, of course, but what kind of clinical accident leads to the discovery that something normally injected into your arm for one disease also works for something completely different when applied much farther south by a method that you probably don't want to discuss in polite company?

    BCG ( bacille-Calmette-Guerin aka the now rarely used TB vaccine( has been used as immunotherapy with some success in the treatment of malignant melanoma as far back as the early 1980s.

  • Sojourner wrote: »
    A minor head-scratching tangent... My friend Dave has just had what looks like successful surgery for bladder cancer, and he's been told that part of the follow up treatment is a course of injections of a vaccine originally meant for TB. Happy for him, of course, but what kind of clinical accident leads to the discovery that something normally injected into your arm for one disease also works for something completely different when applied much farther south by a method that you probably don't want to discuss in polite company?

    BCG ( bacille-Calmette-Guerin aka the now rarely used TB vaccine( has been used as immunotherapy with some success in the treatment of malignant melanoma as far back as the early 1980s.

    BCG - that rings a very distant bell. Would that have been a vaccine that was administered to school-age children in the UK in the 1950s?
  • Sounds like it - we were jabbed in 1964 or thereabouts, when I was an inky-fingered Third-Former!
  • They stopped doing the mass BCG immunization programme in the early 2000s. I had it as a teenager, but my brother is a couple of years younger and I don't think he did.
  • I think it's something to do with the bacterium involved generally priming the immune response when circulating (one of the reasons TB is such a sod to deal with is that it grows incredibly slowly in dark corners of the body, and doesn't often circulate in the bloodstream).

    It sounds like a safer version of Freund's Complete Adjuvant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freund's_adjuvant
  • MooMoo Kerygmania Host
    I've heard there is some evidence that people who were given BCG as children are slightly less likely to get COVID.
  • I'd treat that considerable caution given the infection rates in the UK!
  • It certainly didn't stop me getting covid last March.
  • I think it's something to do with the bacterium involved generally priming the immune response when circulating (one of the reasons TB is such a sod to deal with is that it grows incredibly slowly in dark corners of the body, and doesn't often circulate in the bloodstream).

    It sounds like a safer version of Freund's Complete Adjuvant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freund's_adjuvant

    Back to cancer - if you want to reduce me to a shivering wreck pleading for mercy, just use that word 'adjuvant' in my hearing. The adjuvant treatment (interferon) was worse than the melanoma.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Sojourner wrote: »
    A minor head-scratching tangent... My friend Dave has just had what looks like successful surgery for bladder cancer, and he's been told that part of the follow up treatment is a course of injections of a vaccine originally meant for TB. Happy for him, of course, but what kind of clinical accident leads to the discovery that something normally injected into your arm for one disease also works for something completely different when applied much farther south by a method that you probably don't want to discuss in polite company?

    BCG ( bacille-Calmette-Guerin aka the now rarely used TB vaccine( has been used as immunotherapy with some success in the treatment of malignant melanoma as far back as the early 1980s.

    BCG - that rings a very distant bell. Would that have been a vaccine that was administered to school-age children in the UK in the 1950s?

    This is something debated on social media at length in southern Africa. I was one of those British colonial children given a large variety of inoculations in then-Rhodesia from the late 1960s through to the '70s and even into the early 1980s: shots against tuberculosis, polio, smallpox, bilharzia, yellow fever, polio. My upper arms and thighs have faint scars (sheaf gun marks) to this day.

    The multiple puncture method of BCG used Paris freeze-dried vaccines and even then was thought to provide broad protection against respiratory infections I'd be curious to know if this has any preventative efficacy against Covid-19 over the long term.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Tangent aside, prayers for all posting here, especially your brother Dave @Stercus Tauri .
  • KyzylKyzyl Shipmate
    During the shit show that was the US last week I also received this news, my cousin Harry was hospitalized over the holidays, after having his last chemo treatment, with kidney failure. That last session precipitated the renal shutdown. They thought he might need dialysis, but they were able to treat it medically. He is home now and very dicey. The understanding is that he might live six months or maybe not even two weeks. Then learned that my cousin Johnny also has been diagnosed with advanced liver cancer and is not given much hope. They are testing him to see if he's a candidate for some cutting-edge treatment. He will have an MRI that will determine if he has sufficient liver mass and blood vessels left to sustain the treatment. His wife Rosemary is head nurse of an oncology unit there locally (S. Carolina), so he is getting good care. It does not sound hopeful but there is the possibility of a transplant. When it rains...
  • Ain't that the truth...
    {{Harry, Johnny, and families}}
  • For your family Kyzyl, and all who post here, my prayers.
  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    @Kyzyl and family 🕯
  • PatdysPatdys Shipmate
    Ongoing reading, prayers and cursing cancer
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    Prayers ascending for all on this thread; cancer truly is evil.
  • DooneDoone Shipmate
    Indeed! Praying 🕯
  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited January 2021
    Kyrie, eleison.

    (Especially on those whose urgent cancer surgery may have to be postponed indefinitely because hospitals in the UK are full of Covid-19 patients).

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