MEDICAL NEWS

Thriving not just surviving

Acancer diagnosis invades a whole family. I’ve once heard it described by a cancer survivor as akin to a grenade going off in your living room.

At the UAB Medicine-Russell

Medical Cancer Center, we do a pretty darn good job of taking care of cancer patients medically. What you might not know is that we do a good job of supporting them spiritually and emotionally as well.

For instance, first cardinal rule: We never refer to patients by their tumor site, as is sometimes the case in some hospitals. Mrs. Smith is not the colon cancer in Room 5. Mrs. Smith is a grandmother who loves to make quilts, cooks a mean green bean casserole and happens to have a diagnosis of colon cancer (Mrs. Smith, of course, is a hypothetical patient).

Because we are all about the whole person, we recently started a monthly support group for people who are undergoing or recently completed cancer treatment. We meet at 5 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month in the Bill and Mary Ann Hardy Community Room at Russell Medical. The community room is on the right just inside the entrance of the professional building.

Most cancer centers have moved from calling these folks cancer patients and now call them cancer survivors. That was definitely an improvement in our thought processes, but I want to evolve that process one more step. I prefer to think of people with cancer as “cancer thrivers.” I don’t want them to simply survive cancer and its treatment. I want them to thrive, in spite of their cancer … or maybe because of it.

I don’t blame God for bad things that happen. I see God in the growth that follows those bad events.

I call that “resurrection thinking.” Cancer is a bad thing. But so much growth, so much good, can come from a cancer experience. Cancer thrivers find new meaning in life. Their faith is deepened. Their priorities refocused. They no longer sweat the small stuff.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I established the Cancer Thrivers Support Group for selfish reasons. The group is my spiritual food. I receive so much more from our cancer thrivers than I ever give them. They are the true heroes in my life.

March is colon cancer awareness month. If you remember Don Knotts as Barney Fife before he was on Three’s Company, it’s time to have your colonoscopy. The United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends having a baseline colonoscopy at age 45. If you are of average risk and have a negative (= good) result, you’ll not have to repeat that process for 10 years. Personally, I’m high risk, so I have to visit my friend Dr. Derek Holcombe every five years. I tell you this because it’s important for you to have the family history/risk factor conversation with your primary care physician, in case you fall in the same camp I do.

Nobody likes to get a colonoscopy – at least nobody who’s normal. But colon cancer is one of the easily preventable cancers if you just go get checked out. And as much as I’d like to get to know you, I don’t really want to see you in my office every three weeks for six months.

Finally, I have exciting news about new things happening at the UAB Medicine-Russell Medical Cancer Center. We are starting a new, high-tech radiation treatment program that is scheduled to go live April 1. The treatment is called Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy, or SBRT for short. Scientists come up with these names, which then require someone like me writing an article like this to explain it. A marketer would call it “Surgery without an incision.”

SBRT uses high-energy radiation beams MEDICAL contoured extremely tightly around a tumor to “vaporize” (think Star Trek) NEWS the tumor while doing minimal damage to surrounding healthy tissues. The beauty of SBRT is that we can complete a radiation treatment in three to five sessions, rather than the traditional 30 or 40 sessions. SBRT has specific applications; it can’t be used in every situation. But it’s perfect, for instance, for newly diagnosed lung cancer patients whose tumors are smaller than 5 centimeters and who are not candidates for surgery George Miranda because of other illnesses (in many cases, emphysema), which is about one in four lung cancer patients with early disease. We’ll be offering SBRT for lung cancer and prostate cancer, and hopefully by the end of 2022, we’ll be offering a clinical trial of SBRT for breast cancer, based on groundbreaking work being done by our very own Dr. Hunter Boggs, who practices at UAB and at Russell Medical. So keep watching us, because great things are happening at Russell Medical. ~ George Miranda is director at UAB MedicineRussell Medical Cancer Center.