A 132-pound ovarian tumor was removed from a Connecticut woman in February, two doctors involved in the case said Friday.
It took a medical team of 12 surgeons five hours to remove the tumor from the 38-year-old woman.
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The patient, who has remained anonymous, said the tumor started growing in November, gaining 10 pounds a week. It was removed during surgery at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, Dr. Vaagn Andikyan told CNN.
“During the surgery, we removed this gigantic tumor that originated from her left ovary,” Andikyan, a gynecologic oncologist and the lead surgeon in the case, told CNN. “We removed her left ovary, her left (fallopian) tube, and we removed the affected peritoneal tissue that was adhering to the ovary.”
The surgeon said the massive tumor began in epithelial cells, which line the ovary. Andikyan described it as “mucinous,” meaning it was filled with a substance similar to gelatin.
“Ovarian mucinous tumors tend to be big,” Andikyan told CNN. “But tumors this big are exceedingly rare in the literature. It may be in the top 10 or 20 tumors of this size removed worldwide.”
Dr. Linus Chuang, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology for Western Connecticut Health Network who also worked on the case, told CNN the tumor itself was benign. However, it needed to be removed to save the woman’s life since it was compressing blood vessels.
The patient had a “very high risk of developing blood clots because of compression of the blood flow,” Chuang said, adding that the woman could not eat or walk.
Andikyan told the Hartford Courant he first saw the woman earlier this year, and could see how much pain she was in instantly. She could not walk, and her leg swelled up.
“As soon as the patient came in my office, we saw desperation in her eyes,” Andikyan said. “She thought she was going to have to live like this and she thought no one could help her.”
Andikyan said if the patient waited “another week or two,” she might not have survived the surgery.
The doctors successfully removed the 132-pound tumor, and six pounds of abdominal wall tissue and excess skin stretched by the tumor.
“The abdomen was so pushed out that there were a lot of problems with the abdominal wall,” Chuang explained to CNN. “So Dr. Andikyan had to consult a plastic surgeon to do reconstructive surgery afterwards.”
Today, the patient is back to a normal life and is working already.
“Luckily, she did not require any additional treatment. She’s back to a normal life, she’s back to work, and when I saw her in my office, I saw smiles, I saw hope, and I saw a happy woman who is back to her normal life and her family,” Andikyan told CNN.
This was not the largest ovarian tumor ever removed. According to a 1994 report, California doctors removed a 303-pound ovarian tumor from a patient at Stanford Hospital.
