Her cancer is back.
She's been battling stage 4 breast cancer for a few months now. I was never a big fan, but one has to feel bad for a person who isn't even 50 yet.
shareLike you, I was never a fan but that doesn't change the fact that I feel for anyone who has to deal with this. She also has issues with her insurance company after her house burned down in the California wildfires. Tough times for her.
shareYep. I think her treatment now is just trying to slow the cancer to buy her some time. There is no "Stage 5" cancer.
shareI wasn't a super fan but I watched her in Beverly Hills 90210 Charmed and I knew she was in Girls Just want to Have Fun (she apparently did more)
Okay so she was not perfect re personal etc conduct but this is still really bad news.
The only 'good side' is that 'Brenda' and 'Dylan' will be united together in heaven---kinda like fate.
She was in the cult classic "Heathers".
sharePioneergrrrl, your last sentence is stupid. Everyone will die and be together in the afterlife/heaven/so why is it "fate" that she and Luke will be both dead? You will die eventually too. Fate is death eventually...
shareYep. If they were actually trying to stop the cancer at this point she would be undergoing serious chemo and suffering from all the effects. My guess is she is using palliative care which would give her a better quality of what life she has left.
As I recall the first time she had cancer she didn't just go full force with a mastectomy and tried some alternative treatment, and only had the normal mastectomy treatment when the alternative treatment was proven ineffective as the cancer had started to spread to the lymph nodes. Frankly it was probably this stupidity that has put her where she is now. When she was first diagnosed it was stage 0 or 1, which would have been very treatable with a very good chance of elimination if she had not tried the alternative bullshit. But when she ignored normal treatments until it progressed to stage II or III (unclear exactly which it was because she only mentioned it had spread to the lymph nodes but never gave precise details) her chances dropped considerably.
If anything good can come from where she is now it is to may convince any women that get diagnosed now to stop the alternative bullshit methods and go full speed with the standard treatments as soon as possible. In a way she appears to have gone down the same stupid road that Steve Jobs went down when his first attempt at treating his cancer was some wacky new age bullshit.
I'll never understand why so many people want to try alternative forms of treatment when they know the normal methods are at least based on sound science.
I'll never understand why so many people want to try alternative forms of treatment when they know the normal methods are at least based on sound science.
Steve Jobs made the same mistake. Even exceptionally bright people can fall prey to conspiracy theories. Jobs thought a homeopathic cure (suppressed by the medical community of course) would save his life. Most medical professionals are of the opinion that his nine month delay in surgery cost him his life. share
Very true. Although he had pancreatic cancer, which usually has a poor survivor rate, his was a rare less aggressive form of it. His diet was also cited as insufficient.
shareInformative post. Are you an oncologist or radiation therapist?
shareNeither, but when my mother-in-law went through it everyone in the family started researching breast cancer like mad. Unfortunately when she found it it was already stage III. What Doherty has described sounds very familiar. I only hope that it doesn't make it to her liver, that was where the cancer ran its course with her and I still remember the last months when she was on a continual morphine regime that still didn't seem to work.
shareUgh. Sounds horrible. I think I'd up the morphine until I drifted to the other side.
shareShe asked for that very thing more than once in the last weeks. Seeing what I saw, if I ever get diagnosed with liver cancer I'll be planning a trip to a state where euthanasia is legal.
shareWe put down our pets when they are in unbearable pain but there is taboo when humans want to do it. Religious dogma has a lot to do with it.
Hopefully you won't have to make that decision and you die peacefully in your sleep with a clear conscience :)
Well unlike you i wouldn't put down everyone who decides to go a alternative/holistic route. Take Dirk Benedict for instance. He was diagnosed in the early 70's at the start of his career with cancer & he found someone who encouraged him to go the macrobiotic diet route & he pretty much cured himself, so there are success stories out there believe it or not.
shareThat's very much the exception and not the rule, however. Why not go the alternative/holistic route while also using conventional medicine?
shareHe had tumor on his prostate that was only believed to be cancer but never verified to be cancer. Not to mention prostate cancer is one of the slowest progressing cancers out there and the latest studies indicate that not treating it is often a viable option unless it interferes with your ability to urinate because those that do nothing usually die from something else before the cancer can get them.
So he may have had a cancerous tumor, he may have had a benign cyst, from all accounts he never had a biopsy to find out what he had. So I'm not willing to put any faith in his macrobiotic diet curing him. If it was a cyst then it may have gone away on its own if he had decided to live on a diet of M&Ms and Big Macs.
Ask Steve Jobs' widow how well a macrobiotic diet worked for Steve.
"Like you, I was never a fan but that doesn't change the fact that I feel for anyone who has to deal with this."
Likewise. I've lost a couple of friends to this, the cancer returned and it couldn't be stopped the second time. My sympathies to anyone who has to go through this, it's a terrible thing to face, and I hope she has someone to turn to for support.