文档介绍：COVER
Health Special: Cancer
How we find it. How we treat it. And how we may finally be able to outsmart it

What I Learned from My Cancer Scare
By Dr. Mehmet Oz Thursday, June 02, 2011
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCO GROB FOR TIME
At some level, I knew I was standing in the middle of New York City traffic, but my mind
was in another dimension entirely. Reminders of your mortality will do that.
The day hadn't started off so strangely and scarily, but it hadn't started off to be much
fun either. I was going to my doctor's office for a colonoscopy, my second in nine
months. Colonoscopies aren't supposed to happen nine months apart, of course,
unless the first one turns up something worrisome — and mine had. Back in August, my
doctor discovered a suspicious polyp that needed to be removed. It turned out to be
precancerous, and while a large majority of such growths do not eventually e
cancer, colon cancer usually starts with just that sort of polyp. So did I have the
40-some years left to me that I had been more or less counting on — or just a year or
two? You ask a lot of existential questions like that when you get the kind of news I had
gotten. And you do a lot of hoping that when you return for a follow-up exam, all will be
well — and the problem will simply go away.
Now I was going in for that follow-up. Surely I would get the all clear, and life would go
back to being what it had been. I didn't, and it didn't. My doctor found another polyp,
higher up in the colon — a more dangerous location.
I left the doctor's office and stood out on the street wrestling with the news. Pedestrians bustled by — all of them, I felt, untroubled by the
kinds of things I was feeling. But of course, I wasn't alone. Indeed, I had something mon with millions of people across the . I
was a medical statistic, one of many, many patients who receive the kind of diagnosis I did every day of every year. The very fact that I
was joini