Impact of Chemotherapy on Organ Failure

In everything I've seen, in all the autopsies I've done of cancer

patients,

not one of them died of cancer. They died of liver failure.

They died of cardiac failure, renal failure, all due to

chemotherapy. We got a patient that had been through chemo and

radiation, and they had cooked her liver

and cooked her kidneys.

We looked at the blood work and realized she had no organ function to

speak of left. And I said, "We can make her more comfortable,

but the radiation treatment that they used on her

has actually destroyed her organs." So we did what we could.

She'd been given three weeks. We gave her six months, and she got

time to say goodbye to her family. But I remember walking into the office

the morning after she passed, and this internist was

sitting on the waiting room couch.

And I said, "What's the problem?" And she looked at me, and she

said, "I'm doing the death certificate, and I don't know what to

write for cause of death." I said, "You might try writing the truth for a

change." And she said, "Do you know how much trouble I can get in

by

doing that?" I said, "If you're gonna study with me,

you're gonna write

the truth." And she wrote radiation poisoning,

cause of death. She's the only doctor I've ever seen do

that.

She actually had the courage to tell the truth.

Mm-hmm.