Miami: Dr Tomoaki Kato had to remove a lot more than a cancerous tumour during an unprecedented operation on a 63-year-old Florida woman earlier this month.
To get to the tumour, which was buried deep in Brooke Zepp's abdomen and threatened to kill her within months, the organ transplant specialist said he first had to remove her stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver and small and large intestines.
The organs were chilled and preserved outside Zepp's body during a painstaking 15-hour operation at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Centre.
They were re-implanted in their normal position after the tumour - which was about 2 inches in diameter and wrapped around Zepp's aorta and the base of two other arteries - was removed.
Inoperable
Kato said that never before have six organs been removed from a patient's abdomen to allow doctors to go after a malignant growth previously considered inoperable because of its location.
"There's nothing really simple here," Kato, who trained as a surgeon at Osaka University in Japan, said on Monday. "I don't want to say acrobatic but it's kind of, in a way. It's a very tricky operation."
