I am very sorry to hear about your dad, I have seen chemo first hand as well as x rayed people who have then been diagnosed with cancer, I am not much help as I am a student radiographer but heres what answers I can give you;
1. Yes many patients experience vomiting and diahorrea, there are lots of other side effects but v & d seem to be some of the most common.
2. Different chemotherapy drugs have different short term and long term side effects and certainly not all chemotherapy drugs cause every side effect. In general, chemotherapy damages cells that are dividing, so the parts of the body where normal cells divide frequently are likely to be affected by chemotherapy. The mouth, intestines, skin, hair, bone marrow (the spongy material that fills your bones and produces new blood cells) are commonly affected by chemotherapy. Hair is growing all the time. The skin is constantly renewing itself. So are the lining of the mouth and digestive system. To do this, the cells of all these body tissues must constantly divide to produce a steady supply of new cells. And when cells are dividing, chemotherapy drugs can attack them.
Although most anti-cancer drugs have side effects, not everyone will get these effects. A person may experience no side effects of chemotherapy, some side effects, or all of them. Whether or not a person will experience a particular side effect, when it will start and stop or how bad it will be depends on many factors. Some of these factors are, how long a person has been taking the drug, a person's general health, the dose or amount of the drug, the way the drug is given, other drugs that may be given in combination.
3. Like it says above, it depends on many factors of the treatment and drugs used, so it is very hard to say. Hopefully it wont take too long for your father to recover
Hope I have managed to help a bit somehow
Sending lots of love and positive thoughts to your father, and hoping he has a very speedy recovery
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