Last night, some strummed guitars and others wielded banjos for a packed house at Poquatuck Hall in Orient with more than a hundred watching from the audience. Even 10-year-old Gideon Burnes Heath participated in the evening of song and music, playing Coldplay's The Scientist from behind the hall's grand piano. Called a Song Swap, this duel-purpose event was aimed to entertain and raise money for renovations to historic Poquatuck Hall. The Song Swap is the third of its kind, organized and emceed by Gideon D'Arcangelo. I like to think of Poquatuck Hall like our living room in Orient. It's a space where we can all come together and do this sort of thing, Mr. D'Arcangelo said during the event's introduction. Poquatuck Hall was built in the nineteenth century to provide Orient with a town hall and entertainment center and to this day it still fulfills those functions. Money made from the first Song Swap raised funds to rip out the linoleum flooring to reveal and refinish the original hard wood beneath it. This year's profits will go toward replacing an old oil furnace in the basement to replace it with a higher efficiency gas furnace for the building. Using the hospital's state-of-the-art HALO system, Dr. Mehta is able to remove those pre-cancerous cells, lining the esophageal, after which, he said normal tissue grows back in its place. He said it is a same-day procedure with minimal recovery time. Before this procedure existed, having Barrett's esophagus meant patients could only watch and wait to see if their pre-cancerous cells evolved into something more sinister. Major surgery might be performed to remove, at times, major sections of the esophagus, sometimes moving the stomach up to connect it to whatever section remains unaffected.
Those with Barrett's esophagus are 40 to 130 times more likely of developing Adenocarcinoma, the type of esophageal cancer that is the fastest growing in the United States.