What is cancer

We all know that "cancer is bad", but what about tumors? What is the difference between a cancer and a tumor? In proper English:

cancer is a bad tumor

What is a tumor?

A tumor is "a bunch of cells that shouldn’t be there in the first place".

What are cells?

Cells are little tiny living things.

They can join themselves "in a smart way" to form tissue or organs.
They can divide themselves to multiply
They can die

So back to our question: What is a tumor?

A tumor is "a bunch of cells that shouldn’t be there in the first place". In proper English we talk about "a growth".

sometimes cells just don’t die
sometimes cells multiply where they shouldn’t do so

Now I can imagine you have a lot of clutter in your house that you don’t need, yet that still doesn’t make your house bad. Same with tumors: the fact that there is a tumor, doesn’t mean that things are bad.

In medical terms doctors will call it:

benign tumors or "good tumors": they are just in the way but don’t do any harm (yet).
malignant tumors or cancer or "bad tumors": these cells can start invading cells around them or even worse: start traveling around in your body to attack other cells. And remember: cells are just what organs are made of, so basically these traveling cancers start attacking other organs.

Metastatic cancer

A metastatic cancer is such a cancer that has been traveling in your body. Sound great "traveling" but it actually means you have 2 cancers:

the primary cancer is where the bad cells started multiplying (and most likely still are)
the secondary cancer: is where the cancer is settling down for the second time. Secondary cancers can travel through the bloodstream or through the lymphatic system: in other words: they can go wherever they want to go in your body.

Metastatic liver cancer

Metastatic means the second cancer and he settled in the liver.

Metastatic liver cancer unknown primary

All this to say what father died of: metastatic liver cancer but we don’t know where the primary cancer was located.

So father had to battle the liver cancer and on top of that the primary yet invisible cancer.

Now you say: how can a cancer be invisible, you talk about growth, didn’t you?

Fathers secondary cancer in the liver was growing like a mushroom, so we could clearly see that something was growing there.

The primary cancer was growing somewhere else and as soon as it was a tiny bit bigger, it started traveling to the liver, settled down and started growing like mushrooms. All modern scanners were not able to see where the primary cancer was.

So if you think modern medicine has evolved far, think again… In fathers case: we cannot even locate a tiny malignant cell inside 1 persons’ body…

Cancer is bad: bad growths of cells.

Metastatic cancer is when these bad cells start traveling to somewhere else in your body. Metastatic cancer is literary twice as bad as cancer.