20-pound tumor removed during COVID-19 surge

BROOKFIELD — In late March, as the surging coronavirus became the health industry’s biggest priority, hospital executives pointed out other patients with serious diseases also needed to be treated.

They were speaking of people such as 68-year-old Vince McRuiz, a Brookfield father of three who had recently retired from IBM to tend to his wife, who died from Parkinson’s disease. The cancer tumor in McRuiz’s abdomen weighed 20 pounds and was making him so weary that he was fatigued after the lightest chore.

“My mother and two good friends died from cancer, so when I got the diagnosis, I thought I was going to die,” McRuiz said during an interview this week.

His medical team agreed his needs couldn’t wait. Although McRuiz wanted to get a second opinion and perhaps receive treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan, the COVID-19 crisis was so pronounced in New York City that McRuiz would not have been seen right away.

“That fortified my faith in having the surgery locally,” McRuiz said.

That left McRuiz and his lead surgeon to face one of the most complicated procedures of its kind during an unprecedented public health crisis that had shut down all but a few avenues of normal life in Connecticut.

“He was so symptomatic that waiting until COVID-19 was over wasn’t an option,” said Dr. Margo Shoup, a surgical oncologist and senior vice president and system chairwoman of the Nuvance Health Cancer Institute. “Even if it weren’t for COVID, we would have had to get him into the operating room quickly.”

Because the hospital and its parent organization Nuvance Health had spent the previous weeks strengthening infection-control protocols and making new ones for the most vulnerable patients, all Shoup had to focus on during the fourhour operation was resecting three tumors totalling 33 inches.

“A lot can go wrong,” Shoup said of the retroperitoneal sarcoma, a rare form of abdominal cancer. “The size of the tumor near so many other organs and other tissues, sitting on top of major blood vessels — you have to work very carefully to take it out.”

Without the emergency surgery during an unprecedented crisis, it’s hard to say where McRuiz would be today.

Yet patients such as McRuiz who need treatment for cancer or other ailments may be hesitant to trust their care to a hospital for fear of contracting the coronavirus, Shoup said.

That was the case in mid-May, when physicians here and across Connecticut were alarmed by a 39 percent drop in the number of stroke victims seeking emergency medical help, due to the false public perception that hospitals were only treating COVID-19 patients.

Today, while more patients have received the memo that hospitals are open for business with up-to-date infection control protocols, people are still apparently shying away from treatment.

“A hospital right now is one of the safest places you can be — it’s safer than going to a grocery store,” Shoup said. “It’s getting better than it was, but 20 to 30 percent of our cancer patients still say, ‘I’m not comfortable coming into the hospital to get my surgery.’ ”

McRuiz, meanwhile, says he is progressively regaining his strength with the hope of someday lifting a chainsaw again to pursue his landscape gardening.He says he’s starting to enjoy the life he had before he was afflicted, and the coronavirus changed the world.

He recently got to see his grandchildren in person, with face masks and social distancing, for example.

“I can’t believe the difference in how I feel,” McRuiz said.

McRuiz