The highest solution to deal with most cancers is to seek out it early. So after I grew to become 60 in June, I went for a check-up. COVID-19 would possibly have saved me away. But I had made the appointment ahead of the pandemic began, and by way of then the disaster had dialed again a notch. I didn’t wish to cancel, so masked up and went in to get poked and prodded.
Everything appeared shipshape: center beating, lungs receiving air. My physician scanned his pc: 10 years since my closing colonoscopy — a probe with a tiny digital camera, trying out the intestines for cancerous polyps. Time for some other.
I grimaced and echoed the vintage infant criticism, “Do I hafta?” considering of guzzling a gallon of MiraLAX, used to wash out the plumbing the night ahead of the process. Not a laugh.
No, the physician stated, now there’s a house take a look at …
Great, I stated, hopping up, let’s do this. Never taking into account what a house take a look at supposed. Forgetting all about it, in reality, till a cube-shaped field confirmed up, a Cologuard package from Exact Sciences Laboratories of Madison, Wisconsin.
Here it’s most certainly highest now not to enter an excessive amount of graphic element, regardless that this is coming. You would possibly wish to set this apart till after breakfast.
In the package: is a plastic bracket to be positioned over the bathroom; a stout white jar, or “sample container,” that sits within the middle of the bracket and is aimed for; and just a little vial with a wand in it — quite like mascara — this is later dipped into the contents of the jar. The wand is there as a result of Cologuard assessments for 2 issues: each DNA revealing early most cancers, and the blood that may be an indication of late-stage cancers.
Filling the jar is … now not a pleasing procedure. A definite clean choice is needed — emptying your thoughts and following directions. When I used to be at Step 5(f) “Turn the lid to tighten until it does not tighten anymore,” I had a idea, and that idea was once, “Who is going to open this jar?”
A specimen processing affiliate provides an figuring out label to a pattern jar at Exact Sciences Laboratories in Madison. Keeping monitor of affected person data is essential to the method.Provided
“I see it as a service to humanity,” stated Huan Hoang, who escaped from Vietnam in April 1975. He joined Exact Sciences closing yr after a occupation as a pharmacist, and now’s a Specimen Processing Associate, Level 2 in Madison.
Hoang opens the jars.
“This is serious business we’re doing,” he says. “I’m in the business of taking care of people.”
Four million packing containers have arrived for the reason that FDA licensed the method in 2014. The Madison lab began out as a unmarried suite and, increasing 11 instances, now fills a scientific development, operating 3 shifts, 24 hours an afternoon, seven days per week, with 3 different structures within the town, together with a brand new company headquarters.
“It starts with the Cologuard kits coming in, being cooled down,” Hoang defined.
Chilling the packing containers stabilizes the samples. One by way of one, the packing containers are put on a big gadget.
“Getting the kits into the box cutter,” Hoang stated.
If “box cutter” makes you recall to mind a razor in a plastic care for, assume once more. Each field is ready onto a conveyor, then 4 aluminum brackets shoot in, bracing the field exactly at every nook. A robot arm makes 3 neat cuts. After each minimize, the arm tucks the blade in brief underneath a laser, to test its sharpness because the field is going on its means.
In a colonoscopy, a health care provider exams for most cancers, visually. With Cologuard, your individual excrement acts as a swab; because it worms thru your intestines.
”It’s quite simple,” stated Exact Sciences chairman and CEO Kevin Conroy, who in 10 years took Cologuard from an unproven idea to an organization with 4,000 workers. “If you have cancer, or even a precancerous polyp, those cells shed and end up in your stool. What we do is look for tiny changes that occur inside those cells.”
This procedure, which takes days, distills the contents of that jar, a stool the dimensions of a sweet bar,…