Chemo Killed Colds?…and Other Weird Thoughts

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

My wife’s down with a coughing, miserable, fever-full something-or-other, probably the most recent form of the noravirus...

Working in an elementary school, she’s usually immune to whatever plague is making its way through the general population. But when something smacks into the school and it’s new, and the kids are staying home in droves…well, the staff usually gets it and it wipes them out, too.

So she’s down for the last day before Christmas Vacation.

It wasn’t like that during chemo. We’ve talked about it before. All of the normal illnesses seemed to give way in front of the onslaught of Taxotere (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/10/whats-it-do.html), Adriamycin (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/10/adriamycin-whats-it-do.html), and Cytoxan (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/11/cytoxan-whats-it-do.html), grouped with Neulasta (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/11/neulasta-whats-it-do.html).

But was that truth or only appearance?

Appearance, I guess (http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/preventinfections/patients.htm); though the FACT was that my wife got sick with garden-variety colds and infections less often while she was taking chemo and a reasonable conclusion would be that her blood would be highly toxic to anything else that got into her.

BUT…what about neulasta (the brand name of a compound called PEG-filgrastim)? If white blood cells fight off disease and neulasta BOOSTS the white blood cell count…

I did a lengthy search, but can find virtually NOTHING regarding people who have taken neulasta without having some sort of disease. While one of the side effects of using neulasta is a decrease in mineral bone density, there don’t seem to be any other consistent and wide-spread reactions (of course, there are isolated incidences of nausea, etc. One person even reacted by getting horrible pocks of dead and dying flesh (called Sweets Syndrome)).

It would be interesting to find out if there have been instances of people who took neulasta without having any sort of illness. Would they have a super-immune system? Would they sail through life without illness? Don’t know. The intent of neulasta injections coupled with chemotherapy is to boost the immune system’s response in order to ward of infections during the treatment. That’s what it did for my wife.

The question I have is that if it did that during chemotherapy when the immune system was weak; what would it do for a HEALTHY immune system?

Any anecdotes and web connections would be appreciated!

Image: http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/003/047/iFF/0904-immune-system-sick-02.jpg?1296073869