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Cancer treatment may be hazardous for pregnant women, but that hazard is principally related to the first trimester of pregnancy. It is not uncommon for patients in their second and third trimesters of pregnancy to safely receive chemotherapy and for the cancer and then go on and have a perfectly safe pregnancy.

Hair loss with chemotherapy is emotionally difficult for patients. However, most chemotherapy drugs may not cause hair loss. Even in those that do, one can use something called a cold cap to prevent hair loss from happening. The reason chemotherapy causes hair loss is because the chemotherapy drugs travelling in the bloodstream can affect hair roots and inhibit hair follicles from dividing; thereby causing hair loss. The cold cap uses the cold to switch off the blood vessels to the scalp. This diverts the chemotherapy agents away from the hair roots and therefore for many people there is no hair loss that follows from chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a scary word. It is the use of anti-cancer (cytotoxic) drugs to destroy cancer cells and is a general term for many different kinds of treatment and drugs. There are more than 50 different chemotherapy drugs. In principle, it means not treating by surgery and radiotherapy, but by giving drugs that affect the entire body equally. The drugs go into the bloodstream and travel throughout the body to treat the cancer cells wherever they are. It can be given either as a tablet, or as an injection or infusion directly into a vein. Chemotherapy can cause side effects. The side effects will depend on which drug (or combination of drugs) is used. There are now very good ways of preventing or reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. 

Some cancers have spread at the time when they are diagnosed and require different types of treatment and surgery cannot completely contain the disease. Other types of cancer do not require surgery and other types of treatment such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be sufficient to deal with the disease. Just because a cancer is not operated upon or is referred to as inoperable does not necessarily mean doom and gloom and death from the disease.