Trini doctors make medical history

Three Trinidad and Tobago doctors created medical history when they removed an eight-pound tumor from a 52-year-old man at the Southern Medical Clinic, San Fernando recently.

According to medical records, this is the largest tumor in the western hemisphere and the second largest ever in the world.

Medical records which the doctors used to base their feat, show that the largest tumor successfully removed from a patient weighed 5.018 kilos (approximately 11 pounds) and was done during a five-and-a-half-hour surgery at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi India, breaking the previous record of a 5.5 pound tumor removed at Sir Gangaram Hospital, also in India.

The three doctors — urologist and lead surgeon Dr. Lal Saw, vascular surgeon Dr. Steven Budhoorman and Dr. Peng Ewe, anesthetist, took three hours to perform the surgery on the man from East Trinidad.

Dr. Sawh speaking to the media described the surgery as “touch and go” because of a pre-existing medical condition, which the man had.

The surgeon equated the eight-pound growth to that of the size of a woman’s stomach when she is some six months pregnant.

He said the growth may have developed over a year but the patient’s “self-diagnosed” used a regimen of herbal medicine to cure his sudden weight loss and extending stomach.

Dr. Sawh said if the growth was not removed from the patient’s left kidney he would have died. He was sent home three days after the surgery to recover from the operation.

The doctors said the case would be published in an international and medical journal.