Dr. Oscar López had been operating for 34 years when he entered that operating room at Gandulfo Hospital, near Buenos Aires. He expected to find an orange-sized mass in the uterus of his patient, a 54-year-old woman. What he found was something else.
For 18 months, a tumor had grown silently inside her body until it reached nearly 56 pounds, the same weight as a 4-year-old child. The surgery took four hours. When it was over, the woman left the hospital 70 pounds lighter than when she arrived.
López put it bluntly: he had never seen anything like it in three decades of practice. The surgeons believe it could be the largest tumor ever removed from a person’s uterus anywhere in the world.
