Flashback 2011: Maybe that pain in your gut is cancer

     Sometimes one aspect of life can have an odd resonance with another. I was looking through the archive, noticed this story, and figured it might have the same good effect now that it was intended to have 15 years ago. Then later in the day, I read the obituary of a woman who died from the same ailment that's spotlighted here. Which I took as a nudge to actually post it.

     Even in the heyday of journalism, when newspapers were known for lavish expense accounts, the Sun-Times always embraced a distinct frugality, an attitude I expressed this way: “Before they issue you a new pencil, you have to turn in the stub of the old one.”
     The make-the-most-of-it mind set carried over to reportage. I remember 10 years ago wanting to accompany a team of Chicago surgeons from Shriner’s Hospital to Lithuania, despairing at my chances of being granted a full week for the journey, never mind the associated cost, and rejoicing when I realized the president of Lithuania at the time, Valdus Adamkus, had lived for 47 years in Chicago before renouncing his U.S. citizenship and going back to lead his country. Interviewing him at the palace would add heft to my plea — two birds with one stone! — I cooked up a few more angles: should Lithuania join NATO? What about Catholicism? By the time I was done piling on, we ran a weeklong series that fellow reporters still shake their heads over.
     The travel story was perhaps a stretch — I admitted that few Chicagoans were going to scrap their Disney World plans, but if you were of Lithuanian extraction, or had become bored with the typical European vacation spots, you could do worse than visit Vilnius.
     That story was written sincerely. Yet I was shocked — taken aback, almost frightened — when I later heard from a family who read the piece and were persuaded to go to Lithuania, had a great time and wanted to thank me.
     Somehow I managed not to blurt out, “You went?! To Lithuania?! On my advice!? What, are you crazy?!” But that’s what I thought.
     I felt responsible. Sure, it worked for them. But what if it hadn’t? What if they had a bad time in Lithuania? It would be all my fault.
     I shouldn’t say this: but occasionally, the messing-with-other-people’s-lives aspect of this job unnerves me. You try not to think of that part too often, try not to think of families shlepping to Eastern Europe on your say-so. But sometimes the fact clicks into focus.
     For instance . . .
     The day after Sun-Times owner Jim Tyree died, like everyone who knew him, I was upset, and wanted to write something appropriate. He was fighting stomach cancer, and since the public is not that familiar with stomach cancer, compared to, say, breast or lung cancer, I thought it might be a fitting tribute to use the tragedy to educate others. Tyree would have liked that.
     So I called Loyola University Medical Center and asked for a stomach cancer specialist.
     But by the time Dr. Gerard Aranha, a professor of surgery, called back the next day, I had already written something about Tyree. Still, the doctor was on the phone. It wouldn’t do to just say, “Column’s done, goodbye.” The polite thing was to talk with him for a while.
     “There were 21,000 new cases of stomach cancer reported in 2010,” Dr. Aranha said. “It is the sixth overall, much less common than esophageal or colon, but holding steady.”
     The connection between smoking and stomach cancer is weak, as opposed to charred foods and nitrates, which encourage it. Heredity is also an important factor.
     “There is a familial connection,” said Dr. Aranha. “I always like to ask which family died of gastric cancer — it was Napoleon and his mother.”
     What are the warning signs?
     “A feeling of getting full easily,” he said. “More often pain, like a patient has an ulcer, the sort of pain that doesn’t respond to the usual antacid therapy or, when it does, say with Prilosec, when you stop the Prilosec the pain comes back. Then you’ve got a problem.”
     Also “unease after eating, dyspepsia, bloating, belching, gas that persists for two weeks, are all clues.” Males get stomach cancer about 50 percent more than females do.
     What should a person with symptoms do?
     “See a doctor,” he said. “The doctor will put an endoscope — a tube — down your throat and look at the esophagus and stomach and, if he’s seeing any abnormalities, take a biopsy.”
     Early detection, as with all cancer, is key.
     In Japan, Dr. Aranha said, where use of the endoscope is more common, some 30 percent of stomach cancers are caught in the more treatable early stage. Here, where people are less aware, only 9 percent are found early.
     I almost let this subject drop — who wants to read about stomach cancer? But then I remembered that family going to Lithuania and realized that, once I had this information, it was my duty to pass it along. There might be one guy — maybe you — who looks up from the paper and says, “Geez, I’ve got those warning signs, I better see a doctor.” For me, it’s just another column. But for somebody, it could be a matter of life or death, and once you have that in mind, there’s only one thing to do.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 2011