Wow- This woman had a beach ball sized tumor in her body. The woman waited ten years before getting it removed. Click below to read the full story.
A tumor roughly the size of a beach ball was removed from a Texas woman last month, 10 years after she first noticed her stomach getting bigger.
Over time 70-year-old Joy Self’s stomach continued to swell. When the tumor was finally removed it was 56 pounds — the weight of an average 7-year-old kid.
The tumor was benign.
Feeling healthy again, a significantly lighter Self spoke about the experience Wednesday to CBS News.
“My back and my ribcage just hurt really bad. The bottom of my stomach,” Self told CBS.
Self said she was reluctant at first to go the hospital because she didn’t like doctors. But as the cyst continued to grow it became painful, and eventually Self could hardly walk.
“I had tables to hold onto as I walked to the rooms and stuff like that,” she said.
In April, Dr. Thomas Heffernan at Medical City Dallas diagnosed the begnin ovarian cyst, and removed it the next day.
The mass was mostly filled with fluid, Heffernan told CBS. “The pressure it was generating… really was cutting off blood supply to her legs and was preventing blood flow back to her heart,†he said.
Heffernan said it was the biggest he’d seen in many years.
There are documented cases tumors over 100 pounds being successfully removed from patients.
The largest ever on record was an astonishing 303-pound cyst, removed from a California woman in 1991, a medical report from Stanford University School of Medicine shows.
Massive ovarian tumors are rare, the report said, but there have been other cases of cysts growing up to 300 pounds.
Self said she’s just glad it’s all over. “I feel wonderful now,” she told CBS. “I really do.”
