We recently reported that a NJ woman was rushed to the hospital for a stomach pain and wound up having a 51-pound tumor inside of her stomach. Well the doctors have removed the tumor that was 1/3 of her weight. Click below for the full story and to view the graphic photo of the tumor.

Melissa Nash

Imagine slicing into an onion — and then removing a third of the vegetable without damaging the healthy inner layers and core.
That, in essence, is the medical marvel that Dr. David Dupree and his team at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, N.J., pulled off last month when they removed a 51-pound tumor from a dying woman.
“Before the operation, the doctor told me there was a mass there and that it was very big,” Evelyn, the patient who asked to be identified only by her first name, told The Daily News. “When I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s huge.”
Dupree the tumor “was about a third of her body weight” and took five hours to remove. “One wrong move and she would have died,” he said.
In his first extensive interview since performing the surgical feat, Dupree said the woman — a 65-year-old mother of two from Union Beach, N.J. — has made a remarkable recovery.
Evelyn weighed 171 pounds and “looked like she was nine months pregnant with triplets” before the surgery, said Dupree.
Now, she’s down to 120 pounds and “she has not had a single post-op complication,” the surgeon said. “She has a new lease on life.”
Evelyn agreed.
“This whole surgery was really a miracle,” she said from her hospital bed. “I don’t have any pain. I never heard of anybody after surgery not hurting.”
Evelyn was on death’s door when she arrived in the emergency room last month, breathing with the help of a machine and “maxed out on blood pressure medication,” said Dupree.

Slender and small-boned, the woman thought she was just putting on weight when her belly suddenly began swelling two months earlier.
“I wasn’t in pain, but I was really uncomfortable,” she said. “But I couldn’t go to the doctor right away because I was going to be 65 in June and had to wait for the Medicare to kick in.”
When Evelyn finally got the hospital, a CAT scan confirmed she had a life-threatening tumor growing inside of her stomach.

“It was a malignant tumor” and it was compressing her vena cava, the largest vein in the body that supplies blood to the heart, said Dupree.
“I explained to her that this was going to be a very, very tough operation and that she might not make it through surgery.”
Until that point, the biggest tumor Dupree had removed weighed 11 pounds. And from the minute he and vascular surgeon Alfonso Ciervo sliced the woman open, they knew getting this one out would be trouble.
“We discovered it was fused to the abdominal wall,” he said. “That meant we were literally shaving this thing off, moving milimeter by milimeter for hours.”
When they were ready — and while anesthesiologist Chuck Farrell monitored the woman’s vitals — Dupree said he and Ciervo lifted the tumor out in one piece.
“It was heavy,” the surgeon said.
With this load off, Evelyn immediately began to recover and her blood pressure rebounded back to normal, said Dupree.
The doctors had to remove segments of her intestines that were engulfed by the tumor and some organs. She also will likely undergo radiation therapy. But Dupree expects her to make a complete recovery after she is released next week.
“When I talked to her later, she was just so happy to be alive,” he said.
Dupree was quick to credit the team of doctors and nurses he worked with to save the woman. “This wasn’t a one man show,” he said.
Still, the successful operation was vindication for Dupree — the son of a diesel mechanic from Ogdensburg, N.Y. who went to med school in the Netherlands Antilles and said his struggle to become a surgeon was “a long journey.”
“It was definitely the biggest moment of my career,” said Dupree, 39, a married father of two who lives in Fair Haven, N.J.