Colon Cancer Stages Survival Rates
Ways In Which Malpractice Claim May Follow A Delay In The Diagnosis Of Patient’s Colon Cancer
Just the thought that one may have colon cancer tends to bring up worry in most of people. It can therefore feel quite reassuring for your doctor say that you simply have hemorrhoids. That there is no need to worry about the blood in your stool. However this reassurance should only come after the doctor has ruled out the likelihood of colon cancer (and other possibly serious gastrointestinal issues). Else, you might not find out that you have colon cancer until it is too late. If a physician who automatically assumes that reports of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding by a patient are due to hemorrhoids and it eventually turns out to be colon cancer, that doctor might have committed medical malpractice and the patient might be able to pursue a lawsuit against that physician.
It is generally thought that there are currently over 10 million people with hemorrhoids and another 1,000,000 new cases of hemorrhoids will likely arise this year as opposed to a little over the 100 thousand new instances of colon cancer that will be detected this year. In addition, colon cancers do not always. If they do, the bleeding could be non-consistent. Also based on where the cancer is in the colon, the blood might not actually be seen in the stool. Maybe it is in part due to the difference in the volume of cases being diagnosed that some physicians basically think that the presence of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding is due to hemorrhoids. This amounts to playing the odds. A physician who reaches this conclusion will be correct greater than ninety percent of the time. It appears sensible, doesn’t it? The problem, however, is that if the doctor is inaccurate in this diagnosis, the patient may not learn he or she has colon cancer before it has reached a late stage, possibly even to where treatment is no longer effective.
When colon cancer is detected while still contained within the colon, the individual’s chances of surviving the cancer are over eighty percent. The 5 year survival rate is a statistical guage of the percentage of individuals who are still alive at least 5 years following diagnosis. Treatment for early stage colon cancer frequently entails just surgery in order to remove the tumor and adjacent portions of the colon. Depending on factors such as the stage of the cancer and the patient’s medical history , age, and the individual’s physical condition, chemotherapy may or may not be recommended.
For this reason physicians frequently recommend that a colonoscopy should be done immediately if someone has blood in the stool or rectal bleeding. A colonoscopy is a method that uses a flexible scope with a camera on the end is employed to examine the inside of the colon. If growths (polyps or tumors) are detected, they can be taken out (if sufficiently small) or sampled and checked for the existence of cancer (by biopsy). Providing no cancer is detected from the colonoscopy can colon cancer be ruled out as a cause of the blood.
As a result of diagnosing complaints of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding as resulting from hemorrhoids while not completing the right tests to eliminate the possibility of colon cancer, a doctor places the patient at risk of not learning that the patient colon cancer until it progresses to an advanced, possibly no longer treatable, stage. This might constitute a departure from the accepted standard of medical care and might end in a malpractice case.
About the Author
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting medical malpractice cases and wrongful death cases. You can learn more about cases involving advanced colon cancer and other cancer matters including stage 4 breast cancer by visiting his website
What is the survival rate for stage 3c colon cancer?
My husband was diagnosed with stage 3c colon cancer in July of this year. He is 30. He has had the entire colon removed and has an ileostomy. Cancer spread through the colon to the abdominal wall, two tumors both in the descending colon, and mets to 6 lymph nodes. I see that the 5 year survival rate is typically 44%, but does that mean that 44% of people live for just 5 years? Or that 44% of people live longer than 5 years. We have 2 toddlers and one more on the way, and I am trying to get a handle on the average time we may have left together. He is on 46 hour cycles every two weeks of adjuvant chemo, 5fu and leucovorin. Any advice from anyone would be helpful. Thank you.
Stage IIIC with greater than five lymph nodes positive in a 30 year old is a difficult situation, but if he is one of the “44%” who make it five years with no evidence of disease, he could be cured. That 44% number varies from study group to study group. The advice given to you by the oncologists who know all the details of the case will invariably be better than any gueses we make over the internet – even from those of us who are real medical oncology specialists with years of experience.
The first answer is incorrect is two places. “Looking closely” for recurring or metastatic disease is not a great advantage when he is already receiving the best systemic treatment we have. There are no good salvage chemotherapy treatments for this type of cancer if it grows large enough to show up in the lungs or liver on CT scans.
Also, he is not likely to be greatly threatened by influenza or pneumonia “from” the chemotherapy. With this treatment his white cell count will not fall to dangerously low levels, and at age 30 it would be very unlikely for an opportunistic infection to threaten his life.
The greatest threat is residual cancer cells that cannot be seen now but which may grow to become clinically apparent over the next two years. A tumor the size of a marble contains about one billion cancer cells, so our scans cannot “see” residual tumor masses of only a few million cells.
His doctors are giving him chemotherapy hoping to kill of any residual tumor cell masses that are too small to see. The time the treatment works best is when the disease is too small to show up on scans. Doing excessive numbers of repeat CT scans is just looking for bad news earlier. Follow your oncologist’s recommendation.
People have a great deal of trouble understanding this. Cancer is a microscopic disease long before it is large enough to be a visible tumor mass. Once you can see recurrent colon cancer in the liver or lungs, it is usually too large to cure. Right now, there is still hope. We hope you and he will be in the lucky ~40%.
Surgery Testimonial – MJ Stamos MD