A 50-year-old cancer patient traveled 300 miles to have a 15-pound tumor removed after doctors at home refused to operate.
Julie Camarillo of Michigan had a large tumor in her stomach. She told Fox 32 Chicago, “It was kind of worse than being pregnant. It was a lot of weight on me.”
Camarillo said a doctor back home “said that he couldn’t perform a surgery on me, that it was too entangled and everything.”
But Dr. Malcolm Bilimoria, a surgical oncologist at Endeavor Health Northwest Community Hospital in Chicago, figured out a way to remove the tumor with clear margins.
“The tumor, 60 centimeters in size, weighed 15 and a half pounds,” Bilimoria told the local outlet. “It was pressing on the stomach, and it was causing her not to be able to eat so well. She’s actually losing weight, vomiting many times a day.”
Bilimoria explained the risks of leaving the tumor in Camarillo’s stomach, as it was also pressing on vital blood vessels.
“These are blood vessels you cannot live without. The aorta, the inferior vena cava, these are blood vessels that are crucial to life,” the doctor said.
He added: “At this point, it was either surgery or hospice care. And certainly at 50 we didn’t want to try that.”
Meeting Bilimoria was a stroke of luck for Camarillo. Her husband, Frank, was from Chicago and had a cousin who made the connection.
Camarillo had the surgery at the end of May. It took Bilimoria and his physician assistant over four hours to remove the tumor without damaging any of the critical blood vessels.
“I feel a hundred percent,” Camarillo said now that the tumor has been removed.
Camarillo had first been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and then again in 2017. Every time the tumor was removed, it grew back.
But Bilimoria said he’s “very hopeful” about the results.
“Nobody can predict the future, but this is the first time she’s had a completely margin negative resection,” he said.
Camarillo urged others to “get a second opinion” from other doctors.
“I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t reach out to him. He said that I probably would have been dead by Christmas,” she said.
