Word: colon
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...patient was coming out of sedation Friday afternoon, he got an unpleasant surprise. What had started out as routine minor surgery had turned into a serious problem. One small polyp had been removed from his colon, but in the process doctors discovered another, larger one. They knew that such growths very often become malignant. He would have to undergo major surgery: a three-hour operation, involving a deep abdominal incision, to be performed under general anesthesia, never a happy prospect for a 74-year-old man. The doctors offered him a choice: wait two or three weeks, or go ahead...
Fortunately, there proved to be no need for more sweeping measures. The operation, which took 2 hr. 53 min., went smoothly. A team of six doctors headed by Navy Captain Dale Oller, chief of general surgery at Bethesda, snipped out a 2-ft.-long portion of Reagan's colon, the section containing the 2-in.-long polyp, and sewed the intestine back together. "Our patient, our President is doing very, very, very well," Oller announced about an hour after the surgery was completed. "The operation went absolutely perfectly." There were no signs of the complications that sometimes develop during...
...such concerns were foreseen when the President and Nancy Reagan arrived by helicopter at Bethesda Naval Hospital from the White House about 1:30 Friday afternoon. A routine checkup in March-had disclosed a polyp in the President's colon, and his doctors thought it prudent to remove it and make a thorough examination of the entire intestine at the same time. But they were in no rush and told the President he could schedule the procedure just about any time he chose. He eventually selected July 12, a day when there was nothing much on his calendar...
...Reagan was in an operating room for what was a minor surgical procedure that did not even require a general anesthetic. Doctors inserted into his colon a tube with a wire snare attached to remove the polyp they knew about, and an optical device to allow close examination of the intestine. The second polyp they discovered was too large (about the size of a baby's finger) to be removed in that manner; all they could do then was scrape off some cells from the polyp's periphery for a biopsy. Though Reagan was conscious, he knew none of this...
...through the battery of tests drearily familiar to anyone who has been prepared for major surgery: chest X ray, electrocardiogram and CAT (computerized axial tomography) scan, a kind of super X ray of a large portion of the body. The scan showed no sign of cancer outside the colon. The tests ended about 11 p.m.; Reagan then read for a while (what, no one would say) and fell asleep a bit after midnight. He was awakened at 5 a.m. Saturday for an antibiotic, and went back to sleep for another three hours...