I hope you've used thse experiencee to get your other friends over 50 to get a colonoscopy. Early detection is key. Colon cancer is one of the more survivable cancers if detected in the early stages. My wife lost her father to colon cancer. Because of this family history, she regularly gets colonoscopy screens. The doctors have removed several "pre-cancerous" polyps. Polyps that they say would have developed into full-blown colon cancer if they hadn't removed them. It bears repeating - early detection is key to avoiding and surviving this nasty disease.
[OT ALERT: This comment is way OT for those of you not directly concerned with colon cancer in your family and you should just skip it.]
Yeah, I was amazed to read that he was diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer in February. That means he either wasn't getting tested regularly if he was "at risk" or he had a bad doctor screening him. Everyone should get screened when they turn 40 and then, if they are not at risk, every ten years thereafter.
Like your wife, I have a family history and actually get screened every three years. When I asked my GI doctor how often I should be screened, he answered, "Well, it is suggested that people with your profile get screened every five years." Reading between the lines, I asked him, "OK, but, if you had my profile, how often would you get screened?" He replied, "Every three years." I said, "See ya in three years." I've been doing that for over 20 years now and every time I go, at least one polyp of the type that has a probability of becoming cancerous is removed.
Three years allows for the possibility that even the best doctors can miss a polyp that is just emerging or somehow hidden in a fold of the colon. Also, if you look closely at the statistical data and the standard deviation around the time it takes for a polyp to become cancerous, every three years protects you at the third or fourth standard deviation, or over 99.99% of the time. Unfortunately for those of us with this diagnosis, the best GI docs (and, fortunately, mine is among them) acknowledge that they don't fully understand what makes polyps become cancerous and are just now amassing the data that is allowing them to evolve their understanding. So, there is a randomness here that even regular screening can not obviate; we just have to live with it.
This is one of the many areas where Genomics will benefit my kids when they are in their 30's and 40's. By that time, medical science will be at a "Star Trek" point that will allow doctors to develop treatments specific to each individual tumor. At that point, the science behind Dr. McCoy's
Tricorder will no longer be the stuff of science fiction.
