Health

COVID-19 putting chill on colorectal cancer screening

BOSTON — Looking back, David Thau had been getting warning signs for years.

“Even just going upstairs, I’d be very winded,” the former high school athlete said. “I went to give blood one time and they told me I couldn’t donate because I didn’t have enough iron.”

And there were the stomach pains that would come and go, the fatigue, and the times he would pass blood in his stool – which he self-diagnosed as a hemorrhoid.

Finally, in 2019, at the age of 34, the former Newton resident, who now lives in Washington, D.C., decided to get the symptoms checked out.

“I went to a cardiologist because of the fatigue,” Thau said. “I thought that maybe it was a heart issue. But everything was running fine.”

Thau saw his primary care doctor about his stomach issues and was tested for, among other things, h. pylori, a bacterium linked to ulcers.

“They all came back clean,” he remembers. “So I just felt these were passing nuisances but nothing that was a real issue.”

In early June, doctors found the real issue after Thau developed a stomachache that wouldn’t go away.

“I didn’t go into work,” he recalled. “I was laying face down on my couch and my wife finally said, ‘go see the doctor.’”

He did, and that doctor wasn’t sure if it was appendicitis or an ulcer. In any case, the doctor sent Thau to the local emergency department. It turned out to be neither.

A CT scan revealed a cancerous mass in Thau’s colon.

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“I had a 7 1/2-centimeter tumor, which is essentially the size of a baseball, in my left descending colon,” Thau said.

Thau underwent an emergency colonoscopy to insert a stent because his colon was almost completely occluded. Four days later, after a liquid diet cleared all matter proximal to the tumor, he underwent surgery.

Since then, Thau has become an advocate for the early detection of colorectal cancers.

“If people get colonoscopies, this can be caught early,” he said. “And if this is caught early, there’s over a 90% survival rate.”

Unfortunately, once the pandemic began, there was a 90% drop in those getting colonoscopies, as COVID-19 forced hospitals to abandon elective procedures, according to the Colorectal Cancer Alliance. That group estimates that, as of June 2020, perhaps 18,000 Americans remained at risk for a missed or delayed diagnosis.

“It is unfortunate because we already weren’t screening everyone we needed to screen for colon cancer,” said Dr. Christopher Velez, a gastroenterologist at the Mass. General Cancer Center. “I’m concerned that we’re going to have people coming in with lesions or with cancers that could have been picked up earlier.”

Dr. Velez realizes many are avoiding hospitals because of fear of COVID-19 infections but said those fears are misplaced.

“Multiple hospitals have different safety protocols to try to reduce the risk as much as possible for both the personnel of the hospital as well as for patients,” he said. “And it’s really one of the safest places you can be.”

Some patients also simply fear having a colonoscopy. Rest assured, Dr. Velez said screening does not always have to involve that particular test.

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“There’s stool-based testing, there’s a CT version of colonoscopy, we call it virtual colonoscopy or CT colonography. The most important thing is to get tested, to get screened,” Dr. Velez said.

The Alliance is using March, which is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, to coax 10,000 Americans to pledge to get screened. David Thau needs no coaxing; he just underwent a follow-up colonoscopy a few weeks ago.

“My prep was on Super Bowl Sunday back home; definitely takes you away from the TV,” he said.

The test revealed, some 18 months after his surgery, that Thau is cancer-free.

“It is such a critical test, and the bottom line is, it saves lives,” Thau said.

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