Word: brunschwig
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...newly published French monograph, L'Exentération pelvienne, Dr. Brunschwig reports that no fewer than 116 of his 562 patients have lived five years or longer after the operation. Virtually all have been glad that they submitted to the extensive amputation, even though many have had to wear a bag strapped to their waists to collect urine and feces. Some have been able to work for years, with no outward sign of their condition...
Touring & Swimming. Dr. Brunschwig, a surgeon and gynecologist, decided as long ago as 1934 that some cancer patients for whom all other treatment had failed might be kept alive for several years by operations more drastic than any so far attempted. He began, usually in cases of stomach cancer, by removing most of the stomach, half of the left lobe of the liver, the body and tail of the pancreas, the spleen, the transverse colon and part of the abdominal wall. Of the first 100 patients, 19 lived for one to ten years, including a laborer who went back...
Among women there were even more severe cases in which massive cancers had spread from uterus to large bowel and bladder, or from bowel to uterus and bladder. For them Dr. Brunschwig devised a still more radical operation, removing not only the vagina, cervix and uterus, but much of the lower colon and also the bladder. This necessitates making an artificial bladder from a section of small bowel, or leading the ure ters into the colon, which then empties both urine and feces into a "wet colostomy" bag. After more conventional operations for rectal cancer that has not spread widely...
...well enough to make a transcontinental tour eight years after exenteration for cancer of his rectum and bladder. A woman of 35, whose operation spared the lower part of her pelvis, was having a normal sex life and went swimming seven years after surgery. Dr. Brunschwig's most extreme case was a woman who lost many internal organs, including the left kidney, plus all related lymph nodes, along with her left leg and hind quarter. Eight years later she is living happily and doing all her own housework...
Still Not the Answer. Astonishingly, Dr. Brunschwig's "fiveyear cure rate" of 20% for these supposedly hopeless patients is just about the same as the survival rate for all patients after their first and much less drastic operation for cancer of other internal organs. But for all his encouraging results, Surgeon Brunschwig still does not feel that such surgery is the answer. Exenteration, he says, "is a brutal and cruel procedure." He looks forward to the day when researchers will put him out of business by discovering the drug that will kill cancer cells...