Shila Gonsalves Essays - Cancer, RTT, Medicine, Colorectal Cancer

Shila Gonsalves Eng 102 Professor Streeter Essay #3 Colon Cancer C ancer is a malignant disease that is widespread nowadays . It can potentially up shoot anywhere in the body with no unique warning signs. A sufferer might come to kn ow at a very later stage that they have got cancer . There may well be a chance that he or she is warned way before the disease reaches the stage where it can not be treated. All this is a matter of luck rather than anything else. C ancer can occur in many forms for example liver cancer, breast cancer, thyroid cancer, cervical cancer, colon cancer etc. In short a cancerous tissue can form anywhere in the body. We will focus on colon cancer in this essay. Colon cancer or colorectal cancer is a cancer , which occurs in rectum. The colon is known as the large intestine o r large bowel and t he rectum connects the colon to the anus . If colon cancer is diagnosed at an early stage it can be cured through chemotherapy or surgical treatment however that i s only possible if it spreads in t o the near by lymp h nodes. The American Cancer society stated that colon cancer is one of the main reasons of deaths in America . U nlike breast c ancer or cervical cancer, which a ffects women only , colon cancer can a ffect men and women alike, irr espective of class, race or eth nicity . Despite this it has been seen that it i s more common in men than in women. Colon cancer s ymptoms are simply the apparent changes that one can notice. Many colon cancer patients do not notice any visible change how ever there are few thi ngs that indicate if a person is affect ed by this disease. F or example , according to Cappell (2008), a person might feel abdominal p ain and tenderness in the lower abdomen . D iarrhea or constipation may also be one of the symptoms but many patients tend to ignore such symptoms as these may be caused by food poisoning or not eating enough fibrous food. H owever if the blood comes in the stool or the re is a constant weight loss or intestinal obstruction then the se symptoms are often taken relatively seriously by the people. In almost all cases as stated in Lieberman (2009) , with proper screening , doctors can detect colon cancer before symptoms develop. T he doctor will simply perform a physical test, he or she will press the belly or abdomen and if t he y feel a mass then t he y will c onfirm doubts through fecal occult blood test (FOBT), this test can detect small amounts of blood in the stool but t he loop hole here is that it can also come negative for pati ents who do have colon cancer thus for this reason it must be done along with colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy ( these are the imaging tests that show the entire colon). I f these tests show that a person has colorectal cancer then the doctor s further confirm it through a CT or MRI scan of the abdomen and pelvic area. S ometimes the docto r might also get a CT scan of brain and chest to see how far the cancer has spread and at until which stage the cancer has matured . " C olon cancer is divided into 5 stages; stage 0 is the early stage where it only affects the inner most layer of the intestine and the first stage affects the inner layer . By the end of stage three, the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes and fifth stage is where it has affected the other organs ( the chance of survival at thi s stage is very less). " T he kind of treatment given to the patient depends upon the stage of cancer the person is going through. G enerally there are three kinds of treatments ; surgery, radiation therapy and chemo therapy. S urgery means removing the cancerous cell through an operation. I t is more often