I’ve recently been wondering exactly how lung cancer causes death.
My modest collection of medical books doesn’t offer a clue, and I can’t guess how it might work. It seems reasonably certain that the tumor never progresses to the point that there isn’t enough good lung tissure left for effective respiration. Maybe respiration becomes so painful that the body simply gives up? Does the tumor produce chemicals that cause something else to happen (stroke, heart attack, etc.)? How often are metastases of the original tumor the ultimate cause death?
As I think about it, maybe the mechanism is similar to a pulmonary embolism, which I don’t understand, either.
Thanks, Qad. I wondered if you might be roaming the fora this morning.
To summarize for those who choose not to read the other thread (it is grim), death usually results from some complication of the disease (damage from metastases, throwing blood clots, etc.) And it appears that sometimes the treatment itself can lead to a fatal complication.
That thread and another referenced therein gives a couple of ways a lung tumor can directly lead to death. It hadn’t occured to me that such a tumor could compromise an artery the way esophageal cancer can eat into the nearby aorta. (If I’m ever diagnosed with esophageal cancer, just take me out behind the barn and shoot me - that endgame is particularly gruesome.)
I hear that cancer deaths in general are often precipitated by the tumor getting too big for its blood supply, and starting to die from the center of the tumor outward. This tissue gets necrotic and becomes a big infected mess that taxes the immune system and perhaps poisons the blood.
LC didn’t kill my dad. He lived with it 3+ years after the diagnosis. The metastases on his spine, near the base of his neck, did him in. Thankfully, it was fast, once those kicked in and he was only hospitalized for about five weeks, drowsy with morphine most of the time.
The exact machanism was slow paralyzis (sp?) working its way up his legs, his abdomnen and eventually his chest. His doctor said that when the cough reflex stopped working, it would be a matter of days. Did he die from drowning in his own liquids or from an OD of morphine? I dunno, but it didn’t drag on, and he suffered for only a short period.
My father died of lung cancer, which moved to his brain before it killed him. He was NOT a smoker. (I get mad when people often assume that a lung cancer patient was a smoker and somehow deserves it because of their actions) He lived 18 months after diagnosis. His cancer wasn’t operable, however he did have chemo and radiation. It didn’t metastasize in his internal organs (at least not that was ever diagnosed), but did go to his brain. In the end, he basically stopped eating in part probably due to the morphine, which takes away appetite and in part due to the fact that the radiation and growing cancer make swallowing very difficult. My mother’s brother stayed with her to help care for him, and as he grew weaker she slept with a ribbon tied to his wrist, because he’d try to get up in the night to go to the bathroom, not being awake enough to remember he wasn’t strong enough to walk there, then he’d fall. If she felt the tug on the ribbon she’d wake him up and then my uncle would help him. He knew that time was growing short, and I remember him asking my uncle one evening to help him bathe. My uncle said they could do it in th emorning, and he said that would be too late. He always said he’d fight right up to the end, and that’s what he did, lapsing into a choking, gasping coma. He would squeeze my mother’s hand when she’d say she loved him, but there was no response to anything else. Every day the hospice nurse would come and say he wouldn’t last the night, and yet he’d keep fighting. That went on for five days. Finally, my mother asked us to kneel and say the rosary. Then she and my aunt had a beer (rare for my mother) and she toasted my dad. he died a few minutes later.
It was our experience that hospice wasn’t all that helpful. Not that we wouldn’t’ve been involved in his care, but the more they could push off on the family the better, it seemed. The nurse came weekly, then daily at the end. Once when my mother called because she thought my father had died, they said " Make sure he’s dead then call us back". Apparently it’s inconveiant to die on the weekends. When he did die, they came and flushed his leftover meds (making one of us watch to note they didn’t steal any drugs) then left. At the very end my mother hired a private nurse.
I’m sorry - this wasn’t solely about the mechanics. But there wasn’t any quick embolism or clot for my father - it was long, hard, wasting, choking on his own saliva, gasping for every breath dying. Nothing like the movies.
That’s not nice. From what I’ve heard, flushing unused meds down the toilet is not the best way to dispose of them since they then eventually enter the public water supply, streams, etc. FWIW, my family’s recent experience with hospice during my MIL’s final illness was quite the opposite. And they continued to contact my husband for a while afterward to see if he needed any help dealing with the event.
On the topic – several decades ago my FIL died of what started as lung cancer but metastasized to his brain and he actually died of that.