50-year-old Ward Cheskey follows up routinely with his medical oncologist, Heidi McKean, MD, after being diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2023.
Luckily, it was caught early.
He went in for his annual exam and his doctor recommended he get a colonoscopy. After putting it off for a few months, he finally scheduled the procedure.
“You don’t know if you have something lurking unless you get a colonoscopy,” said Avera general surgeon, Eldon Becker, MD, FACS. “We looked and inside his colon he had a growth that was by naked eye, endoscope, consistent with cancer, we biopsied it and we confirmed it had a cancer.”
Receiving a Cancer Diagnosis
“Very shocking. You just think you’re invincible, nothing is going to happen, and it is a huge eye opener…, life changing,” Cheskey said.
He then traveled from Pierre to Sioux Falls to meet with Dr. McKean, Avera gastrointestinal cancer specialist.
“Thankfully Ward’s case was caught early because he went in for his screening colonoscopy. That’s the best way to find these types of situations as you want to find a cancer early so that you can intervene and go for a cure with treatment. His was found where it was just localized to the rectal area, it had not spread throughout the body,” McKean said.
Treatment for Colorectal Cancer
Ward was able to move forward with chemotherapy and radiation.
“That was about six weeks of taking chemo pills and radiation and we put him through four more months of IV chemotherapy, where he was coming in every two weeks to get chemotherapy through the IV. So if you add all of that treatment time together, that’s over six months of treatment,” said McKean.
He was also enrolled in a clinical trial.
“The trial is actually looking at how can we make total neoadjuvant treatment of rectal cancer even better. Everybody does start out with that long course chemo radiation where we treat with chemo pills and radiation for about six weeks. Then the randomization is that some patients do the two drug IV chemotherapy, and some patients get access to a third drug added, so it’s even more aggressive IV chemotherapy,” said McKean.
After the rigorous treatment, it was time to see if the cancer was gone.
“Went in for follow up scans and amazingly the scans showed it was gone so then I needed to follow up with a full colonoscopy again just for making certain that it was gone, not to get your hopes up, and it was gone,” said Cheskey.
“He had a complete response and that was confirmed when he had the scope that we did not see active tumor on the inside,” said McKean.
Ward is now in surveillance and will continue to meet with McKean and her team. He says his cancer diagnosis even inspired some of his friends to schedule their own colonoscopy.
Encouraging Others to Get a Colonoscopy
“I have a lot of friends around my age that had never had one. If anything good came about this, it’s that it put a little fear in them, that ‘hey a buddy of ours got this, we could get this,’ so I had multiple friends that immediately went in to get colonoscopies,” said Cheskey.
He is thankful for the support he received from family and the Avera cancer team, and encourages others to schedule the potentially life-saving procedure.
“The prep is not that bad, so if you’re scared of the prep, don’t be, you get a nice 45 minute nap, you wake up refreshed and hopefully you get a little bit of peace of mind when it’s over,” said Cheskey.
“We have a very preventable disease, if patients go in and get their screening colonoscopy and have the polyps removed before the cancer is even found, then they don’t ever have to meet me in oncology,” said McKean.
It is recommended you start colonoscopy screening at age 45. Learn more or schedule an appointment.
