09-18-2019, 02:02 AM
This is actually a well-known phenomenon with chemo.
A few resistant cells survive and the cancer comes back ("recurrence"), often worse the second time around.
IMHO, they do not stress this enough to cancer patients: It's not just some cancers, but most do come back. It may be months or it may be years later. You have to be on guard for the rest of your life. You hope that you're cured, but you also hope that it just takes so long that when it comes back you will already have lived most/all of your life.
They often provide "adjuvant" chemo after the initial treatment in the hope that a second round will catch the stray cells that were resistant the first time. (Adjuvant therapy just means that it's not the primary therapy, so radiation, chemo or other stuff may come before or after whatever they do to specifically target the cancer. (In a surgery+chemo combo the chemo would be adjuvant, and in a chemo+chemo combo one of the chemo treatments would be adjuvant.)
A few resistant cells survive and the cancer comes back ("recurrence"), often worse the second time around.
IMHO, they do not stress this enough to cancer patients: It's not just some cancers, but most do come back. It may be months or it may be years later. You have to be on guard for the rest of your life. You hope that you're cured, but you also hope that it just takes so long that when it comes back you will already have lived most/all of your life.
They often provide "adjuvant" chemo after the initial treatment in the hope that a second round will catch the stray cells that were resistant the first time. (Adjuvant therapy just means that it's not the primary therapy, so radiation, chemo or other stuff may come before or after whatever they do to specifically target the cancer. (In a surgery+chemo combo the chemo would be adjuvant, and in a chemo+chemo combo one of the chemo treatments would be adjuvant.)