Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

Chemotherapy is brutal. The goal is pretty much to kill everything in your body without killing you.

Everything on my body turned real dark. My toes, under my feet, inside my mouth, under my tongue - I just turned really dark. I'm still here, but it's gonna take a while to get back to normal. Chemo kills all the good cells along with the bad.

I couldn't possibly lead the kind of life I lead, and keep the schedule that I do, having radiation or chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy takes its toll; the more you keep doing it, you lose your energy, and it gets more difficult to swallow.

Going through chemo is a monster. You literally feel like you're dying every day.

Chemo is awful!

Two days after the chemo I felt terrible, like I had a permanent migraine and had been shot in every limb. I was knackered, starving. The doctor explained that was because I had essentially been poisoned.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

I ate while I was taking chemo. The doctors didn't know. I really didn't get any nausea. I didn't have side effects. I would be drained for a day and a half.

When you are doing chemo, you have a load of time.

Dad's cancer experience included periods of relatively good health as well as bouts of hospitalisation as he coursed his way through a variety of different chemotherapy treatments.

I had a mastectomy in 1998, and then chemo.

I didn't have chemo.

Chemotherapy is such a hard, hard kiss. Anything we can do to alleviate its side effects should be intelligently explored with an open mind.

You have some dark days and dark moments going through chemo and things like that.

Chemotherapy isn't easy. I felt very fortunate I wouldn't have to go through that.

When you get chemo, some people get a lot of sores in their mouth and even their esophagus, so they chew on ice; thank God that didn't happen with me.

I'm taking special treatments for the cancer in my brain and in my liver. Part of the liver was removed, and they did the treatment on four places in my brain with radiation. And now I'm taking a long-term medicine that stimulates my own immune system to fight against cancer.

Did I still feel like I'd been run over by a Mack Truck? Absolutely. It's chemo, after all.

Chemo is properly punishing, and it's hard to do things at the usual level.

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information.

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

I'm not sure anyone goes through a cancer scare unchanged. I know it changed me in so many ways. But I was fortunate to have had a rare cancer that's slow-growing and one that allowed me to skip the chemical cocktails that would have put me into early menopause.