Many women have heard or read about the side effects of chemotherapy, and some are concerned about them. Chemotherapy is a different experience for different people, and the side effects reported by one patient may be completely different from those reported by another.
Cells go through several steps in the process of cell division.
Chemotherapy drugs interfere with various parts of this cycle, so that the cells can't divide, or are damaged and cannot repair themselves. The treatment affects both normal cells and cancer cells, but because cancer cells generally divide rapidly, and are less effective than normal cells at self-repair, they are more affected by the therapy than normal cells. With proper choice and timing of chemotherapy, most tumor cells can be eventually destroyed without excessive damage to normal tissues. There are dozens of different chemotherapy drugs, each designed to interfere with a different part of the cell's duplication process. By using a combination of two or three different drugs with different methods of action, it is possible to affect several phases of the duplication cycle and increase the effectiveness of the treatment.