Surgery: How Not to Die Of Cancer

A whole generation has grown up since William Powell was a matinee idol noted for his sophisticated suavity in The Thin Man, The Great Ziegfeld and My Man Godfrey. Many of today’s moviegoers scarcely know him. But less surprising than his fading reputation is the actor’s actual survival. Last week in Palm Springs, Calif., Powell observed the 25th anniversary of his operation for cancer of the rectum. And with the same smooth ease that made him a hit on the screen, Powell spoke frankly of an illness and a treatment that most patients and their relatives find too embarrassing to discuss.

“I began bleeding from the rectum in March of 1938,” he said. “The doctor found a cancer, smaller than the nail of your little finger, between three and four inches up inside my rectum. They recommended removal of the rectum. Then I’d have had to have a colostomy and evacuate into a pouch, through an artificial opening, for the rest of my life. I didn’t feel I could go for this. But the doctors said that for my particular case they could offer an alternative—a temporary colostomy and radiation treatment. I took it.”

Surgeons made an incision in Powell’s abdomen, brought out part of the colon, and cut it halfway through. “From then on,” said Powell, “fecal matter went no farther than this opening in my abdomen, and emptied into a pouch attached around my middle.”

With the lower colon inactivated, surgeons removed the cancer. Apparently it had not spread. As a further precaution, Radiologist Orville Meland of the Los Angeles Tumor Institute implanted platinum needles containing tiny radium pellets. “For the next six months we simply waited,” Powell recalls. “I had a lot of examinations but led a reasonably normal life. I did quite a few radio shows, though I couldn’t make movies. The worst thing about the situation was the esthetics of it.”

After six months, with the cancer apparently eradicated, the surgeons hooked up Powell’s intestines the way nature had arranged them originally, and he has had normal body functions ever since. As late as 1955, he played in Mister Roberts.

Few cases of rectal cancer are detected early enough to be treated as Powell’s was. If the disease is widespread, the only hope is removal of the rectum. Says Powell simply: “I was one of the lucky ones.”