John Abraham’s colonoscopy was postponed for several months because of the pandemic. When he finally got it, doctors found a growth too big to be removed safely during the scope exam.
He had to wait several weeks for surgery, then several more to learn it had not yet turned cancerous. “I absolutely wonder if I had gotten screened when I was supposed to have, if this would have been different” and surgery could have been avoided, said Abraham, a mortgage banker in Peoria, Illinois.
Millions of colonoscopies, mammograms, lung scans, Pap tests and other cancer screenings were suspended for several months last spring in the United States and elsewhere as COVID-19 swamped medical care.