Cancer Attorney Helps Patients With Advanced Colon Cancer Whose Physician Failed To Follow Up To Their Symptoms

Cancer Attorney Helps Patients With Advanced Colon Cancer Whose Physician Failed To Follow Up To Their Symptoms

Patient: "Doctor, I notice blood in my stool when I go to the bathroom."

Physician: "Don't worry about it, you probably simply have hemorrhoids."

Unfortunately, some time later this individual learns that the bleeding was really caused by a cancerous tumor in the colon. The individual now has advanced colon cancer that has reached the lymph nodes or even to a distant organ, like the liver or the lungs. What makes this happen and what alternatives does the individual and his or her family have if it does?

The first thing to note is that most physicians acknowledge that when someone reports rectal bleeding or blood in the stool a colonoscopy needs to be done in order to determine the source of the blood. The colonoscopy helps figure out whether the blood is the result of colon cancer or something else such as hemorrhoids. But merely assuming that the blood is due to hemorrhoids risks a delay in diagnosing a cancer.

Colon cancer is a disease that progresses over time. As it advances it gets more difficult to treat successfully. For instance, while it is contained inside the colon treatment normally involves surgery to take out the tumor and adjacent parts of the colon. Chemotherapy is usually not part of the treatment of stage 1 and stage 2 except that it may be given to someone who is young as a preventative treatment. With surgery, someone with stage 1 or stage 2 has an excellent likelihood of surviving the disease for at least five years after diagnosis. The relative 5-year survival rate is over ninety percent for stage I and seventy three percent for stage II.

Once the cancer progresses to stage 3, it has spread outside the colon. At this stage treatment requires both surgery and chemotherapy (perhaps with other medications ). The relative 5-year survival rate for stage 3 is fifty three percent. If it progress to stage 4, the relative 5-year survival rate is lowered to around 8%. Treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and other medications may or may not still be effective. When treatment is no longer effective, the disease is fatal. Around 48,000 individuals will die from colon cancer this year alone.

If the patient with rectal bleeding gets a colonoscopy and the tumor is located before it has spread to the lymph nodes or to other organs, it can often be removed during the colonoscopy if it is sufficiently small or by surgically removing the section of the colon containing the tumor. Thus the additional time before diagnosis and treatmenet may be long enough to allow the cancer to reach an advanced stage. When this is the case, the patient will need to undergo additional treatments and will have a greatly reduced chance of living for at least five years beyond diagnosis. Subject to the laws of the jurisdiction in which the physician caused the delay, this may give rise to a lawsuit for medical malpractice, or in the most severe case, for wrongful death.

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