Steve’s routine colonoscopy led to a diagnosis of colorectal cancer and chemotherapy.
He had surgery only a few days later. About a year later, he was diagnosed again
with Stage IV colorectal cancer. Hear his whirlwind story here.
Title: Post-diagnosis
“I was first diagnosed with colorectal cancer about five years ago. After a routine
colonoscopy, standard screening procedure for a person my age, at the end of that
colonoscopy I was told that I had colon cancer in about two parts of my colon. As
a result, within just a few days we went through surgery, took out about half of
my colon, and the pathologist report had shown – it looked as though the cancer
had not proceeded outside of the colon.
About a year later, however, I was diagnosed again with colon cancer. My biomarker
CEA had increased and that was suspicious, and we moved towards a PET scan to confirm
that in fact something was there. And so indeed we went back and found out that
I had a met – a metastasis in my liver. That was now Stage IV, and that was the
time that having cancer really sort of hit. And that’s when I got seriously involved
with learning about colon cancer and what the treatment options were and what I
really should do.
So after the recurrence that I had a year later following my colectomy, I went to
a liver surgeon in a large comprehensive cancer center, and was put on not immediately
a surgical path, but a chemotherapy path for about three months.”