BALTIMORE (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Cancer is never an easy diagnosis to
accept -- but when it spreads, the prognosis gets worse. Most patients whose
cancer spreads throughout the stomach are given less than a year to live. There
is a group of surgeons taking on what most consider impossible cases and
performing a grueling surgery to save lives. It gave two terminal patients the
will to live.
Allen Perritt has a need for speed. He turned his passion into a career as a
commercial pilot.
He was about to get in the cockpit for a 15-hour flight to China when he felt a
pain in his side.
"We have an infirmary at the airport, and they examined me," Perritt told
Ivanhoe.
It turned out to be cancer which spread from his appendix to the membrane that
lines the abdomen or peritoneum. Doctors say when this happens, the cancer ends
up smothering all of the organs around the stomach.
"They closed me up and sent me home and said, 'We can't fix you, sir. Have a
good day," Perritt said.
That's when he found Dr. Armando Sardi. Dr. Sardi performs a risky 12-hour
operation to save those sent home by others to die.
"This is an operation and a treatment that has the potential for anything you
can imagine, but the alternative is death," Dr. Sardi, director of the Institute
for Cancer Care at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Md., told Ivanhoe.
Surgeons make a 15-inch incision from the chest to the pelvis and remove as much
of the tumor as possible in a procedure called cytoreduction.
"We start cleaning, organ by organ," Dr. Sardi explained.
What they can't remove by hand -- they use chemo to kill. It's circulated
through the abdomen for 90 minutes, then washed out.
"The heat alone kills cancer cells but also enhances the effect of
chemotherapy," Dr. Sardi said.
It has been used to treat appendix, colon, gastric and ovarian cancers that have
spread to the abdomen wall. In appendix cancer, the five-year survival rate is
up to 80 percent with the surgery. With standard chemo, it's zero. Stage IV
cancer patient Tracy Kyle went from a death sentence to a new life.
"To hear that I could be cured was like, I can do this," Kyle told Ivanhoe. "I'm
only 43 years old. I do have the rest of my life."
Perritt and Kyle say recovery is brutal -- up to two weeks in the hospital
followed by two months of pain, nausea and chills at home.
"I was alive, that's the main thing," Perritt said. "I woke up."
A year and a half later, Perritt's cancer-free -- and relishing his second
chance.
For colorectal cancer, Dr. Sardi says the invasive surgery has doubled the
survival rate compared to chemotherapy alone. He has performed more than 100
surgeries and has had one patient die during the procedure.
