Monday, February 11, 2008
Please explain to me how a person can have colon cancer and the doctors say that they caught it early, so they do the colon surgery and say that everything is good and nothing has spread, but when they went to the doctor for a follow-up, they were told that they had stage III cancer. If nothing had spread, where did it come from?
In early colon cancer where there is no visible spread of tumor outside of the colon, the primary mode of treatment is surgery. As part of surgery, it is important to sample the lymph nodes in the vicinity of the tumor and send the lymph nodes for examination under a microscope (pathology test) to see if there has been spread of the tumor to those regional lymph nodes.
While by visual inspection there may be no clear sign of tumors outside the colon, this does not mean that the cancer hasn’t spread at the microscopic level. It is very important to look at the lymph nodes, and if there is a sign of cancer cells there, the patient should undergo chemotherapy to reduce the chance of cancer reoccurrence.
You have to remember that our current imaging capabilities (such as X-rays and MRI) cannot identify cancer cells at such a minute level, and the only way to identify them is to look for them under the microscope.
Last Updated: 2/11/2008