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“It’s important to think of blood cancers a little differently than solid tumor cancers. They do have a staging system like solid cancers that are one through four, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. So if you have a diagnosis with a blood cancer, and by that, I mean, leukemia or lymphoma, you want to stick to information that has to do with staging within that blood cancer. And stage four blood cancers, yes, are more extensive and often more aggressive or harder to cure than stage ones, but it just doesn’t quite pan out the same way that solid tumors do. Some of the main symptoms that we worry about with blood cancers and especially lymphoma, as well as leukemia, are weight loss. And this applies to solid tumors as well. But usually when it’s quote unquote metastatic or spread, only then with a solid tumor, do you start really seeing weight loss
If it’s in different organs or has a lot high volume or burden of disease. With blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia, you have a full circuit, right head to toe of the entire kind of highway of your blood system or vascular system as well as your lymph system. So unlike solid tumors that have to have high tumor burden, the blood cancers can cause weight loss earlier, because they’re oftentimes circulating systemically. One thing we ask about when we’re worried about blood cancers are B symptoms. And the three things that we ask about are weight loss, unexplained, that wasn’t intentional, drenching night sweats. So where you have to change your clothes or your sheets sometimes at nighttime. And profound fatigue. And that’s because these things usually kind of circulate or have to do with your whole highway system, from head to toe. These are considering both for lymphoma and for leukemia.”
