Monday, August 02, 2010
Life After Cancer: Survivor Turns 100
From Loyola University Health System
Cancer patient Mary Cipolla turned 100 years old on Friday, July 30, more than 10 years after she had was diagnosed and underwent a dangerous and extensive surgery known as the Whipple procedure.
Cipolla was showing jaundice and weight loss when she was diagnosed with cancer in a structure near the pancreas called the ampulla of vater. The only hope for a cure was a Whipple procedure. The Whipple, technically called a pancreatoduodenectomy, involves removal of the head of the pancreas, the gall bladder, the duodenum (first section of the small intestine), the common bile duct and sometimes part of the stomach. The surgeon then reconstructs the digestive tract. The operation typically takes six or seven hours, and the patient spends a week or two in the hospital.
Cipolla now lives independently with her 83-year-old sister in Roselle. She drove until she was 95 and still helps with the cooking, cleaning and shopping. She struggles with her short-term memory and needs to use a walker, but otherwise is in remarkably good health. She looks 25 years younger.
“I feel fine,” she said. “I don’t let the years bother me.”
“The Whipple procedure is possibly the most demanding procedure in abdominal oncologic surgery,” said her surgeon, Dr. Gerard Aranha.
Aranha has done about 400 Whipple procedures, and Cipolla is his oldest patient. In deciding whether to offer the surgery, he considered her physiological as well as her chronological age. She had no other major health problems and passed a heart stress test. She had lots of energy and a positive outlook, and looked no older than 60.
After coming out of surgery, she had a smile on her face and wanted to get out of bed, recalled her niece, Peg Hodgkins
During the 1970s, more than 15 percent of patients who underwent a Whipple died during the operation or shortly afterward. Improved techniques have significantly improved survival, especially at high-volume centers such as Loyola. The post-operative mortality rate of Aranha’s patients is less than two percent.
At Loyola, the five-year survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients who undergo the Whipple is 20 percent. This equals the survival rate at other top hospitals, including Johns Hopkins, Sloan-Kettering and the Mayo Clinic.
“There is a feeling in this country that pancreatic cancer is a death warrant,” Aranha said. “Many patients who could benefit from a Whipple are not being offered the operation. We need to change that view.”
Cipolla and her family are glad that she was offered the operation.
“She has had 10 productive years with her family,” Hodgkins said. “We feel very grateful to Dr. Aranha and Loyola.”
Aranha is a professor in the Department of Surgery at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
Read the full article here.
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