Keyspam102
Keyspam102 t1_ja8boq3 wrote
Reply to ELI5 why cancer is a dangerous disease by MRJ20043102
It’s like someone who comes into your house and eats your food and breaks your stuff and hides your bills. At first it doesn’t have a huge impact but eventually your power is cut off because you haven’t paid your bills, you have no food to eat so you are starving, you can’t properly rest because all your furniture is broken… cancer starts by just consuming the resources in your body, and it becomes overwhelming. It spreads to other areas and does the same thing.
It is so dangerous because your immune system doesn’t recognise it because it’s starts as your own cells. So with the person in your house metaphor, it’s someone dressed up like a family member so you let them in, you don’t throw them out even when you know there is a problem because you assume it’s not them that’s causing the problem.
Advanced cancer treatments function by ‘tagging’ the cancer as an enemy so your immune system fights it. But many treatments just try to kill everything in the radius of the cancer, while trying to limit damage to the rest of your body. So again with the house metaphor - you know the problem is in the corner of one room so you basically try to destroy that area without hurting the rest of the house too much. But there is still damage to the structure of the house that has to be repaired afterwards. This is why cancer treatments are so rough, You basically are killing off your own cells too, just trying to kill the cancer faster so that you can have time to recover.
Keyspam102 t1_j6n1x1j wrote
Reply to comment by PastMiddleAge in The last hour of Cast Away is devastating and beautiful by PastMiddleAge
I always understood it as he was too involved in work/stuff that he didn’t realise her dissatisfaction (same as with the coworker who’s wife was dying, being kind of insensitive or wanting to be personal but not knowing how), not realising how much he loved her until afterwards, and then actually getting a second chance to see her again he was able to accept that she could make a life without him was a testament to how much he changed.
Keyspam102 t1_is9vt7k wrote
Reply to comment by doughy1882 in What is actually preventing our teeth from falling out? by tikkymykk
Yup this is why it’s important to replace lost teeth, the pressure against the opposite tooth plus the pressure against the jaw is very important to how your mouth/jaw functions over the long term
Keyspam102 t1_jefyjeb wrote
Reply to comment by 80088008135 in TIL A newborn baby is 75% water at birth. A slightly higher water content than bananas, but slightly less than potatoes. by Imbiberr
It’s a bit like the ‘what size is your baby’ at every week you are pregnant, I think I had an entire cornucopia inside me, a small bean to a medium eggplant to a cabbage…