An ounce of prevention and a pound of cure
Tim Watkins, a Reno local, knew his family had a history of colon cancer, but he still waited to get screened. By the time he made it in, it was too late.
When Tim Watkins woke up from his colonoscopy, he heard those three words no one ever wants to hear: “We found something.”
That something, he would come to learn, was Stage III colon cancer.
It was a diagnosis Watkins suspected, but wasn’t any less devastated to receive. He’d put his colonoscopy off for a year, until a pain in his abdomen forced him into the office of Clark Harrison, MD, at Gastroenterology Consultants.
“It stops you in your tracks,” Watkins said. “I was very much a ‘Type A’ personality before this whole process, but now, I realize there isn’t a lot that matters outside of friends, family and the relationships you have with them. The rest is just … stuff.”
At a high risk for colorectal cancer, Watkins got his first colonoscopy when he was 40 years old. The recommended age for average-risk individuals is 50 — but Watkins knew he needed to start much earlier.
In fact, his family history really says it all: “Mother, diagnosed with colon cancer; paternal grandfather, diagnosed with colon cancer; brother, diagnosed with colon cancer at age 41; daughter, deceased, diagnosed with glioma of the brain.”
Because of his risks, Watkins was scheduled for another colonoscopy when he turned 45. He didn’t make it in.
At first, Watkins pushed the procedure back because he wasn’t having symptoms. Then, he pushed it back because his 8-year-old daughter was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Six months after she passed away, Watkins received his own diagnosis.
“It’s a devastating word,” he said. “I immediately started trying to understand what the process was, how I was going to live my life and what I needed to do to get healthy again, to get rid of the cancer.”
A surgeon removed 18 inches of Watkins’ colon, as well as numerous lymph nodes.
According to Watkins, doctors told him the plan of attack was to cut out as much cancer as they could — and then mop up the rest with chemotherapy. He thinks he did nine months of chemo, going in for a treatment every other week, but these days, the treatments all blur together.
“Turns out, the better I did with chemo, the more I could do,” he said. “But, by the third or fourth session, I’d be dead for a week after. I started adapting my schedule at work because I knew I could work hard one week, and then be dead the next week. I can’t even tell you how many times I napped in my office.”
Now, Watkins looks back and thinks about how much easier it would have been to deal with polyps, the pre-cancerous masses, than it was to deal with surgery and chemo.
“Colon cancer is one of the most preventable cancers, period,” Watkins said. “The colonoscopy is designed to uncover issues that start out as negligible, but if left untreated, turn into cancer. It’s like getting a splinter, leaving it to become infected and having to cut your finger off.”
These days Watkins is living cancer free. But, a lot of his friends are 45 to 50 years old, and he’s really been encouraging them to make an appointment. He reminds them how easy the procedure is, how simple the prep is now — and that there’s no reason to be scared or nervous.
Watkins’ new motto? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.