They are already fighting a disease raging from within, for which the treatment alone can cause unrelenting sickness. 

Stripped of energy or unable to keep food down, they may be losing sleep about the next scan. 

As the invisible, highly contagious COVID-19 spreads, cancer patients face a new danger, and health care workers in Meridian are taking extra steps to protect them.

Dr. Jennifer Eubanks, a hematologist/oncologist at Meridian Oncology Associates, explained why the people in her care are at an extremely high risk of getting sick.

“They don’t have as good of an ability to fight infections because they’re getting drugs that suppress your immune system, and so whenever they do get infection, they’re at much higher risk of having a bad outcome, including death or an intensive care unit stay,” Eubanks said.

Eubanks’ clinic, which is affiliated with Anderson Regional Health System through its cancer center, has been trying to defer treatments or visits only when it’s safe to do so. 

“(If) it’s not going to have any long-term changes on their expected outcome, how long they’re expected to live, then we’ll go ahead and defer treatments,” Eubanks said. “Those may be lower grade type cancers or maybe some people who have had maybe a metastatic type cancer that’s been under very good control for a few years. We may consider letting those patients defer just so we can kind of get past this hump.”

The staff is sanitizing as much as possible and scrubbing down chemotherapy chairs between patients, Eubanks said. 

Everyone wears masks, even those who aren’t in direct contact with the sick.

Eubanks is encouraging what she calls a form of “extreme social distancing” for her patients.

“I’m asking patients to stay home as much as they can, to limit contact with families as much as they can,” she said. “If they have other people that can go out and shop for them, just to stay away from any kind of stores where there may be crowds of people, those types of things that might be helpful to just limit their exposure.”

One floor down in the cancer center, radiation oncologist Dr. Caleb Dulaney is working to protect the vulnerable by keeping the waiting room nearly empty.

“We tried very early on to start to kind of spread everything out,” he said. “Most of the time we’ll have no one really waiting. We have tried to spread our schedule out such that there’s maybe one or two people in the building at a time.”

Patients can wait in their cars until it’s time for treatment. 

They’ll go through a screening process outside the building and again when they reach the clinics, Dulaney said. 

He’s also been able to turn to teleheath, discussing scans over the phone to keep patients from coming in. 

“Even as severe as COVID is, in a lot of cases, it doesn’t go beyond how severe some people’s cancers are, so we have largely been continuing to treat most everyone that needs to be treated with cancer, but in a different way.” 

How to help

The cancer center is seeking donations of cloth masks for patients. You can drop them off at 1704 23rd Ave., Meridian.