A life-saving operation
Donna Petronila has already achieved a lot in her life. She raised seven children and working in the fields was not easy either. Her mud house in the mountains, which has no running water or modern sanitary facilities, could be described as rustic. She speaks only Quechua, the language of the ancient Incas.
Last Thursday, the patient was brought to the Mission Hospital by one of her sons. She complained of severe pain in her right upper abdomen, but the suspected diagnosis of gallbladder inflammation due to gallstones could not be confirmed by ultrasound. A good 15 hours later, the pain had moved more to the lower right abdomen. And the examination did indeed reveal inflammation of the appendix.
On Friday evening, surgeons Dr. Lukas Steffen and Dr. Hilbert de Vries got down to business. During the laparoscopic procedure, they also found apendicitis, but the tumor in the cecum, the first part of the rectum, was much more serious. The malignant tumor had displaced the exit site of the appendix and thus triggered the inflammation. So the surgical field was spontaneously extended and the entire right colon (large intestine) was sent to the pathologist in Lima.
Subsequent CT scans showed no metastases in the chest or abdomen. You could say that the apendicitis led to the early diagnosis of the colon tumor. Was this a stroke of luck or God’s providence? /KDJ
