Kate Middleton Cancer Battle: Doctor Breaks Down Treatment

sometimes patients will go into surgery for various reasons various symptoms that are not necessarily clear as to what's causing them and at the time of the time of surgery they're actually found to have cancer um and I think that that's likely what happened in this case in January I underwent major abdominal surgery in London and at the time it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous the surgery was successful however test after the operation found cancer had been present it is quite common that patients will present with non-specific symptoms perhaps abdominal pain um commonly patients will complain of um there maybe blood in their stool uh or bleeding um cramping uh sometimes um and that generally will lead to you know further diagnostic workup CT scans and things like that um in which case you might find abnormalities that are not necessarily clearly indicative of cancer um and and that could to a surgery um and then once once they undergo the surgery then it becomes more clear you know what was the cause either it being a benign uh instance or similar to this case a cancerous cause my medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy and I'm now in the early stages of that treatment we generally expect at least four sometimes up to 12 weeks of recovery U after the surgery before we would consider starting chemotherapy um there are you know obviously patient level factors if a patient has a a side effect from the surgery develops an infection or something like that then that would probably delay our initiation of chemotherapy when people talk about preventative chemo really what we're talking about is when a surgeon goes in and removes all the cancer that they can see um and sometimes that's all the cancer and sometimes that's just all the cancer that they can see and there are tiny cells that are floating around that are still cancerous if we were to do surgery alone in those patients that still have those tiny cells the cancer will almost certainly return and so when we talk about preventative chemotherapy the goal of the chemotherapy in that setting is to kill off those remaining few viable cells that are sort of floating around that haven't had a chance to sort of take up shop yet and really set up their Roots the reason why we might consider um adant chemotherapy is actually based on the risk of that patient that individual patient developing recurrence of the cancer the risk of recurrence is calculated by a number of different ways we look at the the tissue or the tumor that's been removed under a microscope and we will look to see uh how involved it is in the primary um Mass has it spread to lymph nodes that are surrounding it uh has it spread to other organs surrounding it and that gives us sort of a stage which you know most people have heard of you know stage one through stage four um based on that staging that gives us a pretty good statistical idea about what is the risk of this patient developing recurrence we use that information and decide who is the best candidate for chemotherapy for preventative or what we call adant chemotherapy in the c a cancer arising within the abdomen is a very non-specific term we would generally Zone that down to uh an ovarian cancer a colon cancer a small intestine cancer a stomach cancer a liver cancer um you know a pancreas cancer so um although those all sort of arise generally within the abdomen they are distinctly different cancers and are treated uh generally speaking quite differently there are any number of different chemotherapies that are used to treat different types of cancers so one of the regimens is a combination of an IV uh that generally is given about once every three weeks and then pills that are given twice a day um that's a very common regimen that is given for col cancer but it would not be the same kind of regimen that would be given if you had ovarian cancer endometrial cancer or other you know potential types of cancer and so really when we're talking about chemotherapy um in general uh that's sort of a an umbrella approach that really doesn't describe what one patient would get versus another it's impossible to say what would be the best treatment um because you know the best treatment is different for individual patients um with that being said uh the IV and the oral chemotherapies are very similar in terms of e uh you know benefit or efficacy uh and so I don't think that there's really a a profound benefit one over the other in terms of kind of the road ahead um you know when a patient under goes surgery and Then followed by chemotherapy you know there's some recovery that takes place there right you know I think it makes sense when you think about somebody going to surgery and they remove um you know part of the bow or you know part of the body that has to heal and so you know there's some recovery that goes for that and then on top of that you know we're giving chemotherapy after that and so that sort of blunts or slow can slow that recovery that's not to mention that you know chemotherapies do cause side effects right you know the side effects of chemotherapy can range from the worst of the worst where you have you know nausea all the time and and vomiting and lose all your hair and then there's on the other end of the spectrum where you have almost no side effects the chemotherapies that you know I use in my practice are sort of in the Middle where they are um you know tolerable but they certainly cause side effects most commonly you know most all patients will have some level of fatigue weakness um generally we would not expect patients to be so fatigued that they're bed bound um but you know definitely feel weak and tired certainly nausea vomiting can happen uh fortunately you know we have great drug uh medications to sort of help reduce those risk of uh um of nausea vomiting um they're depending on again on the types of of chemotherapies they can decrease the blood counts and increase the risk of patients getting infections um um sometimes people will get side effects like numbness and tingling their hands and feet what we call neuropathy um so there's a whole host of potential side effects fortunately most patients won't get all of them but unfortunately almost all patients will get some of them with that being said you know in a young other healthy person my expectation is that you know they will feel be feeling my hope and my expectation is that they will be feeling you know back to theirself within 3 to six months of of completing chemotherapy now when I say back to yourself I don't mean exactly back to how you were before you had a cancer diagnosis but back to sort of being able to you know participate fully and you know daily activities um and hopefully sort of on the road to full you know recovery when you think about kind of ultimately our goal is that the cancer is gone forever and so we're we're doing everything we possibly can to get that patient to cure and then once we finish with that you know that three months or six months however long we'd be giving the chemotherapy then it becomes more of a surveillance let's get back to focusing on you know feeling better recovering and all the while we're going to be monitoring to make sure that we do not see any clear evidence of the the cancer recurring it's a slow journey to recovery getting you know and it depends on the type of symptoms my hope would be that you know in a relatively young and otherwise healthy patient uh they would be able to recover um you know sooner than that um and you know again it's a slow process and it's not like you know one day you wake up and you're and you're recovered so when we talk about going to surveillance um we generally will follow patients for 3 to 5 years to make sure with generally CT scans and and other Imaging modalities uh because we want to make sure that if they have evidence of recurrence we find that of the people who will recur which hopefully will be a small proportion in this case um we the vast majority of those people will recur within the first three to five years and so that's why we follow with CT scans and things like that over the first you know five years depending on the disease that we're talking about

Channel: Entertainment Tonight

Views: 443,401

Keywords: Kate Middleton

Id: QYvJpyrMsQQ

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024