Cancer Stages

Posted on Jul 20, 2016

I tend not to update my blog too regularly. There is not normally much to write about. Months are pretty standard for me at the minute. I have good days and bad. Quite a few rough days at the moment but as always the hospital are all over it so I have nothing to complain about.

Unfortunately I’ve recently learned of a few friends who have been touched by cancer. Its gutting. I guess I’ve always been surrounded by cancer having known a lot of friends and family with cancer over the years but it just seems that lately its all I hear of. I doubt its any more prevalent than its always been but I suppose, as I have it myself it just appears to be that way.

My thoughts are with the people I’ve recently learned of and I’m here for them if they need someone to talk with or rant too. Everybody’s journey is different so all we are able to do is support them through their journey. I think its fine to share experiences so if that’s what they choose to do then I’m happy to listen.

Their cancers are different to mine and have been presented to them as being at various stages of development. Stages of cancer have never been discussed with me, I’m not sure why that is. I do think that it might have given me an idea of where I was at. Staging in Myeloma is slightly different to the staging described below (I know that now). I probably failed to ask the right questions in the beginning. If you need to know about myeloma staging then I recommend cancer research UK. I think that knowing and understanding staging may have also helped me ongoing. I’ve found the past few months pretty depressing and I’m not totally sure why that is. If I had to describe how things have been its that I have felt like I’ve been sitting in gods waiting room. (not that I’m religious at all) but I just think now that it may be a lack of information and is probably down to my failure to ask the right questions, although I reckon any person with cancer will describe ups and downs in their moods.

I have been off researching and it hasn’t taken too long to gather some info from the old ‘Wonderweb’ re cancer staging. Cancer research has a great article to explain cancer stages so I thought it might be an idea to link it up and to take a short time to understand it.

I wasn’t aware that there where different ways of staging cancer. Its known as the TNM system. You can read more directly on the cancer research pages as far be it from me to try and re word their advice.

Here is a brief summary of what the stages mean for most types of cancer.

Stage 1 usually means that a cancer is relatively small and contained within the organ it started in.

Stage 2 usually means the cancer has not started to spread into surrounding tissue but the tumour is larger than in stage 1. Sometimes stage 2 means that cancer cells have spread into lymph nodes close to the tumour. This depends on the particular type of cancer.

Stage 3 usually means the cancer is larger. It may have started to spread into surrounding tissues and there are cancer cells in the lymph nodes in the area.

Stage 4 means the cancer has spread from where it started to another body organ. This is also called secondary or metastatic cancer.

Sometimes doctors use the letters A, B or C to further divide the number categories – for example, stage 3B cervical cancer.

They also explain cancer staging for various types of cancer. Click Here