Vaccines can be a touchy subject. There are those who believe vaccines have something to do with the development of autism in children. There are those who have an innate distrust of large corporations and so find the work some of pharmaceutical companies do suspect. There are those who don’t have a good grasp of the complexities of the science behind all of this and so worry, though they don’t know what to think. The focus of a lot of this thinking is on the consequences of getting a vaccine but that can only be part of the cost/benefit analysis of making the choice to vaccinate or not.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
While there are concerns about the getting vaccinated, too often there is not enough focus on the consequences of not getting a vaccine. The Dog has a personal story about what not having a vaccine can mean. This specific story is about Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). HPV is an extremely common sexually transmitted disease. HPV will infect atleast 50% of all people who have sex during their lifetime. When it was first being studied the researchers found it was "nearly everywhere". For the most part there are no symptoms and the infection goes away. However, in some women it becomes a chronic condition, which leads to cervical cancer. This is what happened to the Dog’s Mom.
All cancer is serious, but cervical cancer is particularly serious. The five-year survival rate for all stages of cervical cancer (meaning a combination of all the stages it can be in at diagnosis) is 71%. Which is really a good thing, but when your threshold is survival, there is a lot of things none of us would want. Mom is a 5 year survivor. In fact she is an eight year survivor, but beating the cancer that would have killed her is not the same as being like she was prior to it.
To beat the cancer, Mom had to have surgery, chemo and two courses of radiation therapy. It did what it was supposed to do, it killed the cancer, but it was not without its own effects. It gave the Dog’s mother what is called radiation cystitis and a frozen pelvis. A frozen pelvis is when the organs in your pelvis break down and glue themselves together. Normally the organs have some play, they might touch, but they do not stick to each other, with a frozen pelvis they stick and stay stuck.
Radiation cystitis is when the damage from radiation therapy causes cysts to form on the organs. For Mom this meant her small bowl began to decay. She started having trouble going to the bathroom, think constipation that lasts for months at a time. After trying a lot of different therapies, three years ago they had to do a colostomy, which is basically by passing the end of your bowel and giving you a bag to collect the stool you produce. It is embarrassing, it is a little degrading, but it is survivable. If that was all that happened, well it is still surviving, right?
Sadly radiation cystitis is kind of a slow burning fire. It made the recovery from the surgery take far longer than normal, and the colostomy has never been quite right. Still, living is better than dying, so you go on. Then Mom started to be disoriented and pale. She was seriously anemic, her bladder was bleeding and she was running out of blood. There are things you can do when the bladder bleeds. You can have the bleeding cauterized, which usually takes care of it. After two course of this, interspersed with hospital stays for transfusions, it was still bleeding. The next choice was more surgery. The problem was the fragility of Mom’s organs and the fact they were all glued together, which makes getting at the bladder more dangerous and harder. Since Mom could not live with the bleeding, it had to be done. This would mean a new "ostomy" an ileostomy, another bag to collect the urine she makes.
Unfortunately the scar tissue in her frozen pelvis was too extreme to reach the bladder and the small bowel they intended to use for the ileostomy was to fragile. The surgeons had a Plan B, which was to use the colostomy port for the ileostomy and make a new colostomy port. This was all well and good, but even the existing section of bowel for the colostomy was radiation damaged and the connections to the kidneys did not adhere as they were supposed to. Further, there are leakage problems with the new colostomy, with stool oozing from the wound.
As you might expect, there are issues of infection and trouble healing with all of this going on. A month after surgery, Mom is still in the ICU and the doctors have only one course left, putting her on NPO status, which means no food, no water for anywhere from 2 to 6 months, hoping that not stressing the bowel and kidneys will allow it to heal and adhere. If that does not work, then the options are dire to say the least. More surgery is not really an option, as every time they go in they do more damage to exceptionally fragile organs. If she does not heal on her own, then it is likely the end.
In reality, it is almost certainly the beginning of the end for the Dog’s Mom. To the Dog it seems less and less likely she will see New Years 2011 no matter what. Nevertheless, the point is not that Mom is dying, that comes to all of us and one of the perks (if you can call it that) of a giant Irish family is you learn to live with the fact of the end of life. The point here today is about vaccines and vaccination.
There is a super effective HPV vaccine. In the testing of this vaccine 100% of women who received three injections were protected from the virus. This means those women who have the vaccine will be significantly protected from the risk of having a chronic infection and thus developing cervical cancer. They will not have to face the consequences of being treated for it and live the life of a survivor.
Now, the Dog knows not all cervical cancer survivors have the experience his Mom has had. But the point remains the same, when you are balancing any concerns you might have about Big Phrama, about vaccine safety the other side of the equation is not some abstract chance of "cancer" which is "survivable" the chances are it is something more along the lines of what you have read above. The question you have to ask yourself is are you willing to risk it? Mom has lived eight years we would not have had if she had not been treated for her cancer. However it is the treatment and its side effects which is now killing her. The Dog nor his sisters, nor for that matter his Mom would not give up that time, even with its costs, but wouldn’t it have been altogether better if we had not had to deal with the cancer and the aftermath at all? This is what the HPV vaccine can provide for thousands and thousands of women and families. If the Dog could go back in time and have his Mom vaccinated, he surly would.
So there it is, a single, personal story of what it can look like to survive cervical cancer. Those who want to can reasonably dismiss it as anecdotal and atypical if they want. Both would be true to a certain extent. Still, if this is what success and survival look like, shouldn’t that factor into any decision on this vaccine?
The floor is yours.