By LENA PRINGLE
WISH-TV | wishtv.com
It’s the leading cancer killer in men and women nationally.
The five-year survival rate is only about 20 percent. That’s because by the time you know you have it the cancer has progressed. But if doctors can diagnose it earlier, the cure rate is over 90 percent. A new way to spot it and remove lung cancer is giving patients hope of surviving it.
Cancer patient Rodney Poche said, “These are more of the presidents coins.”
Collecting enough special coins to give to his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and that adds up to quite a lot of coins! “Six kids, 30 grandkids, eight great-grandkids, and three on the way.”
Poche says he feels blessed for each day he has with his family. Doctors found cancer in his kidney. They removed that two years ago, then it spread to his lung.
Dr. Brian Mitzman of the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute said, “Lung cancers are hard to detect because they usually start at just a few millimeters in size, and you can’t see that on a chest X-ray.”
Mitzman is one of the first to use an ion robotic assisted navigation bronchoscopy to help pinpoint exactly where the cancer is.
“It’s a tiny camera that will go down the airway of the patient and go inside the patient’s lung,” Mitzman said. “It takes the patient’s CT scan and builds us this 3D augmented GPS pathway and tells us exactly where to go, so we could get out to where their tiny little two-millimeter nodule is. We inject a little dye into it so that when we go to do the lung resection it glows for us.”
Poche had a tiny cancer nodule in the upper part of his right lung, a spot, Mitzman says, they would never be able to see on a CT scan.
“So without this technology, we would end up having to take out a fairly large piece of his lung to make sure we got all of the cancer,” he said.
Instead, he removed just a small piece, about the size of quarter. Poche recovered in days instead of weeks, and he is now cancer-free, just in time for three new family members to arrive this spring.
Many other hospitals are using this technology in biopsies, but the Huntsman Cancer Institute is one of the first in the country to use this technology to mark tumors during surgery.