"He's done well up to now, more than two years since his diagnosis. The original cancer was knocked out by radiation therapy. The first round of chemo also worked well. But this cancer is stubborn and his numbers didn't look good after a blood test earlier this year, so back into chemo he went."
"But now it's the chemo damaging him more than the cancer. I won't go into specifics but the reason he's in the hospital now isn't because of the cancer but because of the therapy. There's no other effective alternate therapy, either. The cost is staggering, too. I don't know how much Medicare and his insurance are covering, but at tens of thousands of dollar per infusion, chemo is going to eat his life savings."
"We went through this last year when my father-in-law died after a five-year battle with a different cancer. He was left nearly bankrupt. In his case there were two immunotherapies employed over five years, and they were effective just as long as his oncologist said they would be, almost to the month. He died of congestive heart failure which may or may not have been caused by his cancer since his other siblings also died of congestive heart failure in the absence of cancer."
An elderly pancreatic cancer patient was admitted to the hospital after complications from chemotherapy and is unlikely to be discharged before Christmas. Initial radiation and the first round of chemotherapy eliminated the original cancer and produced more than two years of good response, but blood tests showed recurrence and chemotherapy was resumed. Chemotherapy is now causing more harm than the cancer, prompting hospitalization, and no effective alternative therapies exist. Treatment costs run tens of thousands of dollars per infusion, threatening to exhaust life savings and shaping survival odds. A recent family experience with costly immunotherapies led to near-bankruptcy.
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