Surgeons Successfully Remove Brain Tumor, Make Startling Realization After Placing Mass on Scale
Generally speaking, tumors are classified as benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). Often, benign tumors can be left in place and cause no life-threatening problems.
Brain tumors, however, are a different story. Regardless of their classification, they generally need to be removed.
Santlal Pal is a 31-year-old shopkeeper in India.
As seen in the photo above, he has developed a large brain tumor that interferes with his vision. The tumor had grown across the midline of the brain and passed through the skull.
Surgery would be risky and the prognosis was grim. Doctors at Mumbai’s BYL Nair hospital performed a harrowing 7-hour surgery on Feb. 14 to extract the interfering growth, Yahoo reported.
You can’t just go in and cut off a tumor. Despite being an erroneous growth, blood vessels circulate through it and the mass is connected to the surrounding tissues.
Considering that the surrounding tissue is brain matter, it’s unsurprising that the mortality rate for the procedure is quite high. “It was an extremely daunting and complex surgery,” head of neurosurgery Trimurti Nadkarni commented, according to Yahoo.
“He was on ventilator support for three days. His tumor was totally excised along with involved skull bone which had invaded the brain.”
Thankfully, 11 units of blood later, Pal survived. Once the medical team separated the mass from the body, they weighed it for record-keeping.
What was intended as a matter of data collection turned to shock and surprise. “After the patient regained consciousness, we researched and concluded this was the world’s heaviest tumor to be reported so far,” Nadkarni said.
The tumor weighed in at 1.87 kilos, approximately 4 lbs. Previously, the largest tumor extracted from a patient who survived the procedure was 1.4 kilos, or 3.08 lbs.
Hospital officials report that Pal is recovering well. He is already walking and eating normally and Nadkarni is hopeful that Pal’s vision will improve.
Imagine carrying around an extra four pounds on your skull — that’s half the weight of the average human head!
Thank goodness for modern medicine that allows people suffering like Pal to be restored to health.
We can only hope his recovery is complication-free, and that his full vision returns.
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