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…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for
answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The
following entry appeared in December of 2012…
My wife’s down
with a coughing, miserable, fever-full something-or-other, most likely 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!
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