Breast cancer is a fairly common and dangerous form of cancer. It occurs when a lump of cancer cells forms in or near the breast and is more common in women. Breast cancer can happen to anyone at any age, and it’s important to receive regular examinations to ensure your cancer-free.
Like all forms of cancer, breast cancer has the potential to be fatal if it is not detected early enough. The longer you have breast cancer without knowing it, the more likely it is to spread to other parts of your body and become untreatable. Therefore, it is vital to have breast cancer detected and treated as early as possible. The treatment you receive will depend on what stage of cancer you have and how advanced it is.
Surgery is one of the most common treatment options for breast cancer. The goal of surgery is to remove all or as much of the cancerous tissue and cells as possible. There are several surgical options when it comes to breast cancer, including a lumpectomy, a mastectomy, and lymph node removal.
If the breast cancer is small and localized, a lumpectomy can remove the cancer. If the cancer has spread beyond a small lump and into the breast at large, a mastectomy is necessary to remove one or both breasts. It’s also possible that the cancer has spread to the nearby lymph nodes, in which case lymph node removal surgery is necessary.
Chemotherapy is the most common treatment for all forms of cancer, including breast cancer. Chemotherapy uses medications and drugs to kill cancer cells in the breast, thereby eliminating the cancerous tumour or making it small enough to remove with surgery. Chemotherapy is used in all stages of breast cancer.
Radiation therapy is often administered during or after chemotherapy, but it can also be given before. Radiation therapy uses targeted laser beams to kill cancer cells inside the breast. This can kill all the cancer cells or make the cancerous tumour small enough to remove with surgery and is given during all stages of cancer. Radiation therapy is also a treatment given in the recovery process to reduce the chances of breast cancer reoccurring.
In order for cancer cells to grow inside you, they need certain hormones. Therefore, hormone therapy is administered to block hormone production, which starves the cancer cells. Unfortunately, hormone therapy also prevents you from getting certain hormones which could lead to anxiety, sweating, hot flashes, and other health concerns.
Rather than attacking the cancer cells as a whole, targeted therapy uses special drugs that target specific parts of individual cancer cells. By breaking these parts down, it’s possible to kill cancer cells and eradicate them from your body. Targeted therapy can be used in all stages of breast cancer.
In some cases, your cancer might be thriving because your immune system doesn’t know to attack it. Immunotherapy encourages your immune system to attack cancer and is effective with certain forms of breast cancer, such as triple-negative breast cancer.
The unfortunate part of treating breast cancer is that most available treatments hurt other parts of your body. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and hormone therapy all deprive your body of necessary hormones and nutrients and damage other systems. This can result in unwanted symptoms such as nausea, stomach pain, hair loss, blood clots, blood loss, heart, kidney, and organ damage, lung failure, and much more.
While the side effects of breast cancer treatment are painful and damaging, the alternative is often death. Therefore, it is important to seek immediate treatment if you have breast cancer or another form of cancer. The earlier you begin treatment, the more likely it is that you’ll make a full recovery without suffering too many side effects.