The Molinette Hospital in Turin, in northwestern Italy, has achieved an unprecedented operation in the medical literature, as they have explained, after managing to remove a benign ovarian tumor weighing more than 70 kilos.
The operated woman weighed less than the tumor mass removedwhich is a milestone for this type of intervention, which had to be done in two parts due to its difficulty.
It all started with the patient’s visit to the Emergency Room, suffering from serious breathing difficulties. Doctors ran tests on her and found that the reason for her insufficiency was because she had a giant tumor formation that grew from her abdomen, until they found that the origin was in an ovary. «The tumor occupied the entire belly of the patient down to the lungsso much so that he was not breathing, ”explains Dr. Francesco Moro, one of the surgeons who participated in the intervention.
“It was quite a tough operation, but we are all very satisfied since the woman is doing very well now and the recovery was very fast,” he said of the woman, who initially it seemed that he suffered from a serious obesity problem weighing 150 kilos. After the operation, it has remained in little more than 50 kilos.
A two-stage operation
Removing such a tumor mass required very strict planning. First, they aspirated the liquid part of the tumor that was inside a cyst. Only in that first phase, 52 kilos were removed. «This was an essential step to be able to remove en bloc the ovarian cystadenoma weighing about 25 kilos in a second operation“explained Dr. Moro.
Without those 77 kilos of tumor mass, the woman was left in a state of very high muscle weakness, to the point that she had to be transferred to the Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics service to “put her on her feet and make her gain seven kilos”.