Chemotherapy is a cancer treatment that involves administering medications to kill cancer cells or stop them from growing. It is usually given in repeating cycles over several months, with a series of cycles called a course of treatment. The length of a course of chemotherapy usually takes between 3 to 6 months, although it can be more or less than that. During a course of treatment, you usually have around 4 to 8 cycles of treatment. A cycle is the time between one round of treatment until the start of the next. The length of a cycle depends on the drug(s) you receive, and most cycles range from 2 to 6 weeks.

A chemotherapy regimen is the specific combination of chemotherapy medicines you will receive at this stage of treatment and the number of cycles you will receive it. Your regimen may change over time as the doctors and nurses see how your body reacts to the different medicines. A cycle of chemotherapy is repeating the way a drug or a group of drugs is given over a specific number of days. For example, one cycle may be taking the drug for every day the first week and then taking the next week off. The cycle is repeated a specific number of times. The doctor chooses the drugs and the number of cycles of chemotherapy from completed and successful research studies, which spell out the dose of the drugs to be given and how often they should be given.

After each round of treatment, you have a break to allow your body to recover. The rest between treatments allows your body to recover from any side effects. The exact treatment plan that your doctor suggests is based on years of research, and the drugs aim to kill the cancer cells while causing as little harm as possible to normal, healthy cells. The length of a person’s chemotherapy sessions will depend on the type of chemotherapy they receive. The most common way that chemotherapy drugs are given is through a needle into a vein, called intravenous or IV chemotherapy. Oral chemotherapy is also an option, taken by mouth as a pill, capsul...