Jan 3: One week from today, on Tuesday, January 10, Mom will be at Rochester having her pre-operative appointment with Dr. Michael Farnell.
For so many months, the chance was dim of Mom being able to have surgery to remove her pancreatic tumor. But now, seemingly quite suddenly, the day of her surgery approaches. So I’ve been trying to learn more about the Whipple Procedure in order to know what to expect.
During the Whipple Procedure, also called a pancreaticoduodenectomy Mom will have many pieces of her lower digestive tract removed: the head of the pancreas, possibly the spleen, her gall bladder, bile ducts, part of her upper intestine including the duodenum, and a portion of the lower stomach. Here’s a diagram of the pre- and post- operative anatomy. I also found some historical information on the Whipple Procedure on the Wikipedia.
Once she is in surgery, the first thing Dr. Farnell will do is to do a laparoscopy to see if the cancer has spread. If it has, she won’t have the surgery. If Dr. Farnell doesn’t see any signs of spreading, he will begin the Whipple procedure. As he moves forward with the Whipple procedure, there are several points at which he can stop if he determines that he won’t be able to remove 100% of the tumor. So Mom won’t know until she wakes up whether the surgeons are able to do the complete Whipple. It still seems so weird to be hoping that they can do the most complete, aggressive version of this operation.
Mom is expecting to be at Mayo for about 14 days after surgery (at least, that’s the average post-operative hospital stay). She’ll probably have a good couple months of general recovery time. Here’s a nice website that describes the surgery for patients.