Coimbatore hospital removes ‘world’s heaviest ovarian cancer tumour’

COIMBATORE: A hospital in Coimbatore has removed what could be the world’s heaviest ovarian cancer tumour from a 46-year-old woman from Ooty.
Hospital authorities on Thursday evening said the tumour weighed 33.5kg, which is equivalent to 11 full term babies born at an average weight of 3kg each.
On a cold December morning last year, doctors in city-based Gateway clinics saw a thin, frail looking woman walk in with a huge abdomen.The clinic receptionists remember having to move a stool or two and clear extra space to accommodate the woman.
Due to the massive tumour in her abdomen and the resulting weight gain, she was struggling to breathe and even sit in a place for a few minutes.
“The tumour had reportedly been growing for the past two years slowly but the woman kept ignoring it as a case of weight gain due to old age,” says the operating surgeon Dr Sendhil Kumar.
“It was only in the last two months that it became massive in size and the woman began struggling to walk and breathe, and had abdomen pain,” he adds.
Local doctors in Ooty refused to operate on the woman stating that her chances of survival were slim.
A chance encounter with a co-passenger at the Ooty bus stand led the patient and her husband to the hospital here.
“We immediately realised that it was a tumour, but the sheer size involved too many risks like calculating the right amount of anaesthesia, which is usually done based on body weight. Since the tumour was pushing the diaphragm up, her lungs had collapsed. And the inferior vena ceva had been compressed,” said Dr Kumar.
The doctor said, “We conducted all investigations in a day and took her in for surgery the next day. The surgery took three and a half hours to complete because we used special equipment to seal blood vessels and reduce bleeding and we had to have machine to keep massaging the leg muscles and avoid a deep vein thrombosis,”.
Once the 33.5 kg tumour was removed in December last year, the woman’s weight dropped from 75kg to 42.2kg. “Since it was an early stage cancer, no chemotherapy or radiation was required,” he said.
The hospital’s surgery has entered the Asian Book of Records. The entry into the Guinness World Records has been submitted but yet to get confirmed, said hospital authorities in a press statement issued on Thursday evening.
In India, the previous heaviest ovarian cancer tumours weighed around 20kg – one case in AIIMS, New Delhi, and another in Puducherry.