Carrying a Human-Sized Weight Around

In May 2018, in a Connecticut hospital, a group of twelve surgeons worked for five hours to remove a tumor from the abdomen of a thirty-eight-year-old woman. That may seem like a lot of doctors and a long time for a single tumor—until you learn that single tumor weighed 132 pounds! The patient reported that, prior to the surgery, the tumor had grown at a rate of ten pounds per week. That’s forty pounds a month! “

Ovarian mucinous tumors tend to be big,” said Dr. Vaagn Andikyan, who was the lead surgeon on the team. “But tumors this big are exceedingly rare in the literature. It may be…