‘Plump’ lady had 140-pound tumour
Woman’s weight cut in half after operation to remove a monster ovarian cyst
ALLENTOWN, PA.— Mary Clancey said she was resigned to being a plump old lady.
For 15 years she kept getting bigger despite dieting. With her health deteriorating, her son persuaded her to go to the hospital.
What doctors found astounded them: a cyst on one of her ovaries had grown into a 140-pound tumour.
Doctors at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown removed the cancerous mass in a five-hour operation Nov. 10.
Going in, Clancey weighed 365 pounds. After five hours in surgery, she lost 180 pounds of tumour and tissue, about half her weight.
“You can’t imagine in your wildest dreams something that huge,” she told Philadelphia TV station NBC10.
As she was gaining weight, Clancey, 71, of St. Clair, Penn., said doctors told her just to watch what she ate. At just over five feet tall, she said she felt destined to become “a short, round, fat little old lady.”
The tumour didn’t really cause her pain. “It just made itself comfortable in there,” she said.
But by the time she went to the hospital, it had become difficult for her to walk and even stand.
Dr. Richard Boulay, who performed the operation, said the mass was so big it didn’t fit in the picture taken by a CT scan.
“It was slowly killing her,” Boulay said Thursday.
To help in the removal of the tumour, a second table had to be moved next to the one on which Clancey was lying.
“One of the tenets of cancer surgery is when you take out a mass, you don’t want to pop it,” Boulay said about how he planned for the unusual procedure. “This is going to be big. How am I going to lift this out? And I said, ‘I’m not. I’m going to have to roll it out.’ ”
Made up predominantly of water, the tumour was “slippery and nasty,” he said.
After nearly a month in recovery, Clancey is back home, working to regain her balance as a lighter woman. She now weighs less than 150 pounds and said she feels great.