Today my girlfriend Freya (who is a urologist) came home with a “this is a first” story. And a pretty bad one for the patient.
The patient is Bulgarian, and extremely obese.
450 lbs +
The doctors already knew that he has a tumor on one of his kidneys, but they had also seen that his liver was “scathed” in some way.
They needed to find out what the primary cancer is, and so he needed an MRI-scan.
Turned out he was too big to go into the machine — which was a very first.
Then a number of problems occurred when, as an alternative to the MRI, he needed to undergo a PET-scan biopsy, and again his immense body obstructed the entire process.
And now another problem has arisen.
Even if the kidney tumor is the primary cancer, Freya does not see how to operate on a man this big a size.
There is so much fat in this man, and so much weight, that be it through an open surgery or a robot-assisted operation (Freya does both), she sees immense problems which might be almost impossible to overcome.
So now the Bulgarian might have to move to an Academic hospital where they are used to “special cases” (think House and the like).
Freya has said it time an again, that very obese people do not understand, besides the direct danger they are in, how difficult it is to perform medical procedures on these patients — let alone when every minute counts.
And that is bad, but also very sad.