Recognizing the Symptoms of Esophageal Cancer
- A former TV weatherman from Texas, Rusty Garrett, shared that he was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer after mistaking symptoms for acid reflux.
- Unfortunately, the symptoms of esophageal cancer can often be vague like some pain swallowing, weight loss, or hoarseness/cough.
- In Garrett’s case, this pain was so bad he eventually sought help from a doctor, a move he encourages anyone else dealing with these symptoms to make.
- When esophageal cancer is caught very early, it may be able to be removed with an endoscopy. In later stages, it may require surgery, chemo, and radiation.
“Esophageal cancer was never in the forefront of my mind,” Garrett said. “I’ve heard of throat cancer, but esophageal cancer was a new one.”
Read More- Pain/difficulty swallowing
- Weight loss
- Pain behind the breastbone
- Hoarseness/cough
- Indigestion/heartburn
- A lump under the skin
Garrett said that the pain he was experiencing got so bad that he no longer wanted to eat. Eventually, his wife encouraged him to go to the doctor who promptly ordered an endoscopy.
Diagnosing esophageal cancer
Several tests may be used to help diagnose esophageal cancer, including the upper endoscopy, which allows doctors to examine the walls of the esophagus using a small camera that is attached to a thin tube and passed down the patient’s throat.
Dr. Whit Burrows explains how an upper endoscopy works and what doctors can learn from it.
“It’s when a telescope is put down through your mouth by a physician … and it allows you visualization of that inside of the esophagus,” Dr. Whit Burrows, a thoracic surgeon with the University of Maryland Medical System, told SurvivorNet. “The normal esophagus on endoscopy would look like your lips or the inside of your cheek. When you open your mouth and say, ah, it’s not as rough as your tongue. What we’re looking for [with the endoscopy] is any lack of uniformity of that lining any lesions, any irregularities, any loss of symmetry.”
In Garrett’s case, his doctors said he had either stage 2 or 3 esophageal cancer which means that the cancer did not appear to have spread to other organs. They made a treatment plan that involves chemotherapy and radiation first with plans for him to undergo surgery in December. He’s sharing his story in hopes of raising awareness so other people will speak up and seek treatment is they notice symptoms.
Treating esophageal cancer
Early-stage esophageal cancers can sometimes be removed using just the endoscopy. However, once the disease progresses, many patients will need either chemotherapy, radiation, or both before they move onto surgery. The order of these treatments, and if a patient can even undergo them, depends on symptoms and the severity of the disease.
When a patient comes in with a large "obstruction," which cannot be removed with just surgery, Dr. Raja Flores, a thoracic surgeon with Mount Sinai Health System, told SurvivorNet the first move may be to send this patient to the radiation oncologist to get treatment started. "The majority of the times, you'll get a response, things will open up, you will be able to eat," Dr. Flores said.
Dr. Raja Flores explains that surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation may all be used to treat esophageal cancer.
“What determines whether you can get that combination of chemotherapy and radiation depends on your symptoms,” he added. “Symptoms really dictate whether or not you're going to get radiation there, but also, do you have distant disease? If you have a tumor in the middle of the chest but a metastasis [somewhere else], if you don't need radiation to open things up so you can swallow, usually in those cases they will just give you chemotherapy."
Immunotherapy for esophageal cancer
In some cases, there will still be cancer left in the body after all of this treatment for esophageal cancer. This does not mean that all treatment options have been exhausted and patients should ask their doctors about immunotherapy.
Dr. Sophia Pintova, a medical oncologist at Mount Sinai, explained to SurvivorNet that during surgery, a part of the esophagus will be cut out to sent to a pathologist and sometimes, the pathologist will detect that cancer cells are still present.
“In that situation, if there were remaining cancer cells [after] surgery … it’s a good discussion to have with their oncologist: whether they would benefit from something called immunotherapy,” she explained. “Immunotherapies are drugs that activate your own immune system to fight the cancer.”
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