The stool test is so easy and cost effective that everyone should have it done annually. And men who get the prostate exam -- well, the doc has the sample right there and should use it.
OK OK, I have been really remiss on this one. Two close relatives (father and brother) have died of colon cancer. I've had colonoscopies on the recommended schedule for people with family history of colorectal cancer, but haven't kept up to date with the occult blood check.
Hopefully early detection will allow for a successful treatment and long life.
You did not mention the stage of her cancer. I guess they will not know until the pathology report to be performed after the colectomy.
Sorry to hear this. I cannot offer advice on what will happen but I had a great friend die 3 yrs ago from cancer and his wife told me how some of his
That is one among many difficult things about being treated for cancer. It used to be that doctors were seen as all-knowing and it was just assumed that they knew best. Nowadays one is supposed to be an "informed patient", but it beats me how it is possible for me to be as informed about cancer as a doctor with four years of medical school plus internship, residency and (I expect for oncologists) additional training in their specialty. There is a series of commercials, I forget for what product, that show doctors trying to do the patient's job and making a complete botch of it, with the voiceover "you wouldn't want your doctor to do your job....why would you try to do your doctor's job?" But as a cancer patient it sometimes seems like that's what is expected of us: the doctor presents one or more treatment options and the patient has to decide which one to go with. How on earth do I know which one is best? A lot of the time your doctor doesn't really know either because there has never been any study aimed at answering the specific question you may be asking to try to decide between them. When I do make up my mind, do I really understand the information I'm basing my decision on, or do I have some sort of fundamental misconception about the treatments or about my condition which is leading me to make a stupid choice? It's frustrating, and sometimes I worry that I will not ask a question that I should, or omit to report some side effect, or make some boneheaded mistake that will cause my treatment not to be as effective as it could be. And as you say, there are also times when a doctor doesn't tell everything s/he knows. That has already happened to me once—a radiologist did not include in his report everything that was visible on my CT scan and, if the omissions hadn't been discovered, I might have decided, based on that incomplete report, to pursue a treatment that would have been totally inappropriate to my actual condition.The omissions were discovered more or less by accident; I asked a question about the scan (not questioning the doctor so much as just trying to understand what was going on); my oncologist didn't know the answer so he reviewed the scan with another radiologist, and then it all came out. OTOH I don't know how the doctors manage to keep track of the multiple treatment options for dozens of patients with different kinds of cancer at different stages and with or without any number of underlying or unrelated health conditions.
My oncologist replied to my email. She said I shouldn't interrupt my treatment to have a colonoscopy, which I take to mean they don't like to do routine screening colonoscopies during chemotherapy. She also said, without explaining why, that the fecal test was inappropriate, but it seems well within the realm of possibility that the chemo meds could affect the test and make it give false results. Even if not, maybe they just don't want to be faced with deciding whether a positive test warrants interrupting treatment to do the colonoscopy.
I have to confess I have given up on doing this without really trying. I could spend every waking hour in online research, and still have little confidence that I actually know what is going on, that I understand the rationale behind choosing one treatment over another, that I am avoiding stupid mistakes or that I will know what question to ask to catch any mistakes my doctor may make; and maybe more important than any of those things, I don't think that putting all that time and effort into research, even if I did it absolutely perfectly, would have any major effect on the success of my treatment. And that's not to mention the possibility that, immediately after I had made some major decision about treatment based on study X, study Y would be published with additional data, contradicting X and making its conclusions obsolete.
I think that although different chemo drugs target different cancer cells, a drug used for breast cancer would also stop the growth of a colon tumor if not shrinking it. This would make the internal bleeding stop, and render the fecal test ineffective. A colonoscopy would still spot a tumor, but the prep may not be appropriate now, as your oncologist said.
