Nothing gets between this middle school math teacher and his kids. Not COVID, not cancer.
Will Loesel, 35, saw his cancer diagnosis delayed by COVID-19. He’d seen a doctor about his sore throat and swollen lymph nodes in January. Concerned, the doctor referred him to a specialist. But as the coronavirus outbreak hit, that appointment was canceled, according to a WBTV report from Charlotte, N.C.
Read More“It's really kept my spirits high and all of the positive energy that comes back from the kids,” says the father of two, who takes his iPad along for treatments to stay in touch with students. "I am able to post and respond to the questions and grade."
This â¦@CharMeckSchoolsâ© teacher gets a cancer diagnosis while schools are closed due to COVID-19. He doesn't stop teaching – he teaches from his hospital room. This â¦@TeachForAmericaâ© teacher says connecting w/ students is part of his treatment. â¦@WBTV_Newsâ© pic.twitter.com/7c0CXMTtww
Dedrick Russell WBTV (@dedrickrussell) May 4, 2020
After working in corporate America for 15 years, Loesel returned to school to pursue teaching. As a new teacher, he’s worked hard to establish a relationship with his students.
"It takes a long time for some of these students to trust," Loesel said. "They don't want to risk being disappointed … and I finally have that trust."
Like Lindel, second-grade teacher, Ashley Saaranen found inspiration in teaching while going through chemotherapy.
"It's the most amazing experience I have had," Loesel said of his new career. "I have 117 kids that I teach and I have the privilege of standing in front of them and helping to be small part of their world. I’m very proud to call myself a teacher,” he says, “I know there is nothing else I’d rather be doing.”
Teaching Cancer a Lesson
“You might know what a great friend he is,” says Loesel’s cousin, Colleen Cherry, wrote on the GoFund Me she set up in his honor. “He loves fiercely. He stands up for what he believes in. He can laugh when others may want to cry,” she writes. “The cancer is aggressive. So is the treatment. And Wil is going to fight like hell so he can continue being an outstanding dad, an inspiring teacher, and so he can consume 50+ chicken McNuggets and captain the boat at our next cousin's reunion.”
In addition to his 117 students, middle school math teacher, Wil Loesel, has two sons, Aiden and Sean. He is fighting non-Hodgin lymphoma and teaching during treatment.
COVID-19 Crisis: Cancer Screening Delays
The coronavirus outbreak has caused patients to delay annual hospital checkups, surgeries, and cancer screenings, where in some hard-hit cities they’re down by 70%. Experts tell SurvivorNet that concerns among cancer patients are growing, but oncologists are trying their best to manage both COVID-19 and cancer patients.
"When we have a long period of time where there's not screening being done, and then all of the sudden you start doing that screening again, we're going to have what's called the ‘clearing out of the prevalences’,” Dr. Otis Brawley, a medical oncologist and epidemiologist at John Hopkins University, tells SurvivorNet.
RELATED: Coronavirus and Cancer Survivors: How Long Are You Extra-Vulnerable After Treatment Ends?
"We're going to have an increase in the number of breast cancers in the first months after we start mammography screening again,” Dr. Brawley notes. “'m fairly comfortable that that's going to happen in colorectal cancer,” Increases in prostate and lung cancer diagnoses, he says, will be harder to predict.
Related: Is a Cancer Boom Coming? Coronavirus Stops Mammograms, Colonoscopies, and PSA Tests
In addition to severe drops in cancer screenings, A1C blood tests, which are crucial in detecting diabetes, have dropped by as much as 90 percent. Regular screening tests are crucial for detecting early stages of cancer, and since Covid-19 has halted many screenings, some patients are worried.
"I think for everybody, cancer or no cancer, it's an incredibly stressful time," Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, tells SurvivorNet. "When you add cancer to it all, it's stressful for many patients. They're concerned about how they're getting treatment, how they're getting monitored. Can they have surgery? Can they even leave the house? We're managing a lot for a lot of patients right now."
Dr. Brawley says medical teams will conduct many cancer screenings in the first few months once restrictions have been lifted. “We're actually going to screen a lot more people in that first couple of months than we normally do," Dr. Brawley explains. "Because we're screening more people then, we're going to diagnose more cancer. The ‘clearing out of the prevalences’ is simply the people who would have been diagnosed during the period of no screening [that] are diagnosed when we start screening again.”
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