Harper, 73, played Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970 until 1974, after which she had her own spin-off show called "Rhoda" until 1978. She wrote a tell-all book called "I, Rhoda" that came out in January this year.
She went through treatment for lung cancer in 2009; her diagnosis at this time is Leptomeningeal Carcinomatosis, or LC, which occurs when cancer cells, usually as a relapse from cancer originally in another part of the body, invade the subarachnoid space, enter the cerebrospinal fluid, and are transported throughout the central nervous system. LC occurs in up to 8% of patients with cancer, most often in cases of lung cancers, breast cancers, GI tract cancers, and melanomas.
I didn't know all of that about LC until recently. I follow a blog - Family Bonding Time - about a husband and wife who were both diagnosed with cancer almost simultaneously, and the wife, who has breast cancer, was diagnosed in January with LC as well.
In reading about it, I was shocked to learn that LC can come from the spread of GBM, the type of primary brain cancer that my dad had. We had been told by the team of oncologists and neuro-oncologists that GBM almost never spreads and that we shouldn't be concerned about that for Dad. (Looking back, I wonder if the reason they said that is because they suspected that he wouldn't last long enough for any spreading to occur.) Apparently in cases of LC, often nothing new shows up on scans because the cancer has spread into the spinal fluid rather than through an increase in the number or tumors or in tumor size. Symptoms of LC, of course, are very similar to those of other types of brain cancer, including GBM, but a couple of the markers for LC listed in the information I read caught my eye: extreme lethargy and severe pain reported diffusely in the top of the head, both of which cannot be explained otherwise, as in they do not seem to be coming from other sources like a side-effect of medication or the location of a tumor. Both of these things were true for my dad, especially during the last month of his life, when he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open (but oddly and torturously for him he couldn't sleep because of the massive doses of steroids he was on - because he kept reporting severe pain on the top of his head!).
I guess it doesn't matter, does it? I guess they could have done a spinal tap to check for the presence of cancer cells in the spinal fluid - and actually they did consider doing that to check for meningitis at one point, but then they decided just to treat him with antibiotics that would treat any type of infection instead. If they had found LC, in theory they could possibly have treated it with chemo administered through a catheter into that part of his brain, but honestly I doubt he could have tolerated or withstood that treatment, and I guess I'm glad we didn't have to make the decision of whether or not to put him through such a drastic intervention when it was not very likely to buy him much more time, if any, in his condition. I will never get over the fact, though, that no one on the team of specialists who were assigned to Dad's case towards the end, could even venture to guess why he was going downhill so rapidly, especially after he had been given transfusions and heavy doses of medications to restore his blood counts to within normal limits. "On paper, he should be better," his oncologist said, but he wasn't, and I will never forget those words.
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