:smack:
Oh, no, of course not. To my knowledge, Hilary Clinton has not yet pushed HIPAA through the Argentine legislation.
Forgive my lack of enthusiasm for clicking on the link; I wasn’t about to. So I wasn’t aware this story took place in Argentina. Oops.
This scenario totally makes sense for the woman in the OP, but what the hell happened with the woman with the 300lb tumor? My god, how does it come to that? She wasn’t overweight, she looked perfectly normal except for the ball of flesh the size of hippopotamus where her belly should be.
If I recall the details on that story (and it’s been a few years) she suffers from one of those disorders that result in prolific benign tumor growth (like neurofibramatosis, proteus syndrome, etc.) it was a rapidly growing tumor in a woman with a complicated medical history. Basically, a lot of doctors just didn’t want to touch the case, and the damn thing just kept getting bigger and bigger which made most doctors more and more reluctant to have anything to do with the case. Until the folks who finally helped her, who agreed to try to operate because otherwise this thing was going to kill her by simply growing beyond her body’s capacity to keep it fed.
Unless it’s a different case I’m thinking of… but once a case gets beyond a certain complexity most doctors want nothing to do with it.
According to another online story about the 23 kg tumor, it’s been identified as a sarcoma. Based on the report of it growing “inside the woman’s womb” (uterus), two of the likeliest possibilities are that it’s either a leiomyosarcoma (a smooth muscle tumor) or a mixed mullerian tumor a.k.a. carcinosarcoma (a type of neoplasm which has both epithelial and sarcomatous elements). Both of these are solid tumors - the leiomyosarcoma when you cut into it would look something like the uterine muscular wall. Here’s what one looks like under the microscope.
I would hope the Argentine surgeon called in a pathologist to do preliminary dissection (instead of doing it himself) to preserve anatomic landmarks and help determine if margins were clear. Quite possibly they did an intraoperative frozen section to determine malignancy and guide the taking of additional tissue samples to evaluate for possible spread around the abdominal cavity.
From the title of the thread I was expecting the tumor to be ovarian - commonly, these develop into large-sized neoplasms, especially in obese women who are slower to notice increasing girth. Not uncommonly the surgery techs will wheel these tumors into the pathology laboratory in carts. It’s not my favorite thing in the world to see rolling in for immediate intraoperative consultation.
Jackmannii M.D., pathologist.
You prefer them bouncing instead?
Ah, well - it must have been another fantastically large tumor case I was thinking of. There have been a number of them where you might well have said the person was removed from the tumor rather than vice versa.
Possibly you were recalling the case of Lori Hoogewind or a Romanian woman, both of whom had tumors approaching 200 lbs.
Quite likely. Thanks for finding the names. Maybe next time I’ll remember better 
