It depends completely on which chemotherapy you get, which cancer you have, and sheer dumb luck. Both "chemotherapy" and "cancer" are blanket terms covering a multitude of radically different things.
Best case: your cancer is contained to a single organ and susceptible to antibody therapy. Practically no side effects, and you'll most likely be healed.
Worst case: your cancer has spread to multiple organs, requires the use of cytotoxics and your body reacts badly to those. You're better off setting yourself on fire - at least then you'll have to endure at most a few days of excrutiating pain before you die. No, that is not an exaggeration.
Source: my girlfriend who works as a nurse in a cancer ward specializing in chemotherapy.
Most importantly: make that decision yourself while you can! Don't leave it to the doctors (who only learn ways to keep patients alive at all costs, not ways to decide whether it's better to let them die) or your relatives (who'll tell the doctors to do everything humanly possible to assuage their feelings of helplessness and guilt).
That plainly isn't true. Why come to HN to make hyperbolic generalisations about cancer therapy? There are many people with advanced widespread disease who choose to have treatment. Are you suggesting that they are all foolish or coerced by doctors? Really? Would you be happy to come down to my cancer hospital and tell the 33 year old woman with 2 young children that she is better off "setting herself on fire" than having chemotherapy?
Your last statement also is incorrect. I spend just as much time talking about stopping therapy and options that don't involve chemotherapy as I do about giving chemotherapy.
> That plainly isn't true. Why come to HN to make hyperbolic generalisations about cancer therapy?
That was not a generalization; I explicitly labelled it as "worst case", but what actually happened to one of my girlfriend's patients is that as a reaction to the cytotoxics, his entire skin started to dissolve. This may have been an extremely rare special case, but it did happen, and the doctors in charge didn't stop the therapy even then. The patient died after suffering effectively as a burn victim for 2 weeks.
It's great to hear that you are willing (and presumably trained) to consider non-therapy as an option as much as whatever the newest miracle cure is, but that's definitely no the case for all oncologists everywhere.
You should read a little more carefully. He is not suggesting anything like what you read into it.
Having seen a bad reaction to chemo up close, I can confirm that it is pretty awful, and that I'd certainly have to think before choosing between a bad chemo reaction and setting myself on fire.
Best case: your cancer is contained to a single organ and susceptible to antibody therapy. Practically no side effects, and you'll most likely be healed.
Worst case: your cancer has spread to multiple organs, requires the use of cytotoxics and your body reacts badly to those. You're better off setting yourself on fire - at least then you'll have to endure at most a few days of excrutiating pain before you die. No, that is not an exaggeration.
Source: my girlfriend who works as a nurse in a cancer ward specializing in chemotherapy.
Most importantly: make that decision yourself while you can! Don't leave it to the doctors (who only learn ways to keep patients alive at all costs, not ways to decide whether it's better to let them die) or your relatives (who'll tell the doctors to do everything humanly possible to assuage their feelings of helplessness and guilt).