the essential
A 40-year-old British woman underwent surgery for pseudomyxoma peritonei, and to save her life, doctors had to remove eight non-vital organs.
After a year and a half of fighting cancer Faye Louise, a 40-year-old British woman, is in remission. She was even able to return to her job at London's Gatwick Airport. And that is a miracle… Especially when we know that she had started to organize her funeral in 2023, as reported by the BBC. It all starts from a “mundane” operation for an ovarian cyst. After the operation, doctors had a biopsy done and discovered “pseudomyxoma peritonei”, an extremely serious condition that causes cancerous lesions that produce gelatin. An untreated patient can end up with “liters of gelatin” in the abdomen. Which is terribly painful and above all deadly.
“These are interventions that mark”
To treat Faye Louise, a new operation required removing 8 non-vital organs to save her life. Surgeons removed her appendix, spleen, gallbladder, appendix, ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, navel, omentum and part of her liver. Hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy also had to be performed on the day of the operation. A heavy and complicated process which allowed this British woman to escape a painful death. “She was at risk of death in horrible conditions. I operated on gelatinous diseases of the peritoneum in two cases. These are interventions that leave a mark. You open the stomach and there is so much gelatin that it has to be removed with its cupped hands. It affects the entire abdomen and the pelvis, it’s horrible,” a specialist told BFMTV.
4 and 6 hours of surgery
The operation was long and delicate: 4 and 6 hours for surgery and 3 to 5 hours for chemotherapy, according to our colleagues. But Faye Louise is saved and officially in remission. But as she told the BBC, she is not done with medical appointments and will continue to undergo exams every year in November. Objective: avoid a relapse.
