This weekend I remembered that I wasn’t aware of all the channels we pay for by having Comcast’s Digital Classic. I convinced my parents to get it because I wanted IFC and BBC, and it wasn’t a hard sell because my mom was suddenly without her West Wing fix since Bravo was moved from the basic cable package. So I looked up what other channels we get and one is Discovery Channel Health.
I scrolled the guide to see what that channel aired, and saw one program, and set it to record: 200-Pound Tumor. Now I really didn’t know what to expect besides what promised to be something disgusting. I was not disappointed.
Lori Hoogewind, a forty-something woman from Wyoming, Michigan, has a debilitating disease called neurofibromatosis, or NF, which causes tumors to grow on her body. Since childhood, she has had many – many! – tumors, always benign, that just showed up. She had a malignant tumor in the mid-90’s and her doctors used radiation to attempt to shrink it. The radiation worked on the malignant one, but it caused the adverse reaction on another benign one. As a result, a tumor grew to two hundred pounds in less than a year. The tumor was on the right side of her stomach and grew over on to her back. It dragged on the floor. It was unbelievably huge. She weighed only 120-lbs. and all of a sudden she had to drag an additional two hundred pounds. Her tumor was drawing dangerous amounts of blood from her organs and eventually began affecting her brain.
No doctor wanted to go near the thing, because of all the inherent risks associated with a removal surgery. Finally, doctors at the University of Chicago agreed to operate. This was the biggest tumor ever removed. Because there were so many blood vessels feeding the tumor, it was a very difficult surgery, and lasted 18 hours. The cameras showed the tumor during the surgery and it looked so disgusting. Like raw meat. The surgery was successful, and I cannot imagine what the experience must have been like for all involved.
Since then, the doctor who removed the tumor has gone on to similar surgeries pro bono, most recently for a woman in Transylvania who had the same disease. What a crazy life, to constantly grow tumors all over your body. Horrible, actually.
1 comment:
Strange you should post about this. Just the other night, Chris, Mary and I watched a show on The Learning Channel called, "Face Eating Tumor." It was about an Indonesian child who suffered from dysplasia -- there were massive tumors all over his face, tragically distorting his features in a really gruesome way. But a series of operations was performed and he actually began to recover. But they said he may undergo a lifetime of similar operations, as the tumors may come back. Horrible.
http://tlc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=109445&gid=0
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