In China, a 59-year-old woman went to the emergency room this month with a swollen belly as if she was expecting triplets. She was in fact suffering from a heavy ovarian tumor weighing 35 kilos. Operated, the fifty-year-old is now out of the woods.
The storyline is worthy of a horror movie. In China, a 59-year-old woman was left with a heavy stomach as if she were expecting triplets. Except that it was actually a tumor of the ovaries heavy of 35 kilos, reported the DailyMail December 17. Unheard of, according to the doctors who took care of her. Fortunately, the tumor was benign and the patient is now recovering.
During the month of December, Mrs. Huang presents to the hospital of the medical university of Harbin, in the northeast of China. Her stomach is abnormally swollen and she complains that she can no longer breathe. The doctors are giving him scans. These show a giant growth occupying the entire pelvic cavity, so much so that his liver, gallbladder, spleen or kidneys were invisible. Ms. Huang has an ovarian tumor that weighs 35 kg.
“I’ve been a doctor for 38 years and I’ve seen a lot of big tumors, but I’ve never seen one like this,” Professor Li Peiling, a practitioner in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, told Chinese media. of the hospital. “She was thin as a stick, but her belly was very big, as if she were pregnant with twins or triplets,” he explains.
A “slightly swollen” belly
After making the diagnosis, Li and his colleagues spent 90 minutes operating on the patient, removing some 33 liters of thick, brown but harmless fluid from her ovarian tumor, a benign ovarian mucinous cystadenoma. It is therefore a cluster of non-cancerous cells. The patient then spent 24 hours in intensive care before being transferred to the recovery room.
According to Professor Li, ovarian tumors are the most common form of benign tumors in women. They can affect women of all ages but are often diagnosed late, as patients tend to seek medical attention only when the tumor begins to press on nearby organs.
In Mrs. Huang’s case, “at first, her stomach had swelled up a bit, but she said it was just air and she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” says her daughter. It was therefore necessary to wait for the mass to grow to the point of blocking her breathing for the unfortunate woman to decide to go to the emergency room. At present, she is still in the hospital recovering.
About 4,000 new cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed each year in France
In France, ovarian cancer ranks fifth in women after those of the breast, colon, uterus and stomach. About nearly 4,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. Most of the time, the symptoms do not appear until an advanced stage. These may be digestive or gynecological disorders (abnormal vaginal discharge, menstrual disturbances, bleeding, tension in the breasts, etc.), or disturbances linked to tumor masses ranging from urinary discharge to pelvic pain, as in Mrs. Huang’s case, an increase in the volume of the abdomen and a feeling of heaviness there.
When one or more of these manifestations appear and persist without explanation, it is recommended to consult a doctor who will then perform a clinical examination (palpation of the abdomen, lymph nodes, breast examination, vaginal examination, etc.), supplemented by d possible biological or imaging examinations.
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