“If you don’t suspect it, you can’t detect it.” Today, November 10th, is Worldwide NET Cancer Awareness Day. NET (often called carcinoids for those in the gastrointestinal tract) “is the umbrella term for a group of unusual, often slow-growing cancers, which develop from cells in the diffuse endocrine system.”
So you may see a lot of zebras and stripes today. A zebras is medical lingo for a unusual diagnostic result. From the Free Dictionary:
“A popular ‘short form’ of the aphorism often quoted to medical students during clinical rotations—‘when you hear hoofbeats, don’t think of zebras.’ This variation of ‘Sutton’s law’ is designed to teach students a logical approach to a diagnosis, since common things occur commonly and when one hears hoofbeats, one should first think of horses and exclude them in the differential diagnosis before thinking of the unusual causes—the zebras—of a particular clinical finding.”
However, we know that NETs are routinely undiagnosed for years. Instead, they are diagnosed as other things, leaving those with NETs suffering until the correct diagnosis is made.
I witnessed my wife suffer for years before a visit to the emergency room and a sharp-eyed doctor discovered her carcinoids. This is an experience of so many NET patients.
Please help spread the message. NET patients need not suffer for an average of five years before diagnosis. Show your stripes by posting a zebra and linking to http://netcancerday.org. Use the hashtag #NETCancerDay. Tell your friends. Donate.
This year, I’m donating to the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation as they seek to “fund research to discover cures and more effective treatments for carcinoid, pancreatic, and related neuroendocrine cancers.”
I’m donating in honor of Riley, our Yorkie of 16 years who passed away earlier this year. He was always by my wife’s side, doing his part to comfort her when she was in terrible pain and long before she was correctly diagnosed. He laid beside her, kept her company, was just with her, and he’ll never know the true value of that, of how much comfort he brought to my wife. We miss him.
