Doctors at Bình Dân Hospital in HCM City have successfully used a robot to assist surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from a 89-year-old Vietnamese woman with colorectal cancer at Stage 3. — Photo Courtesy of the hospital

The woman is living in the city. When hospitalised, she only weighed 34 kg and could not walk by herself.

Dr. Nguyễn Phú Hữu of the hospital, who performed the two-hour surgery, said there is a big challenge to conduct a surgery for an old patient with stage-3 colorectal cancer and severe malnutrition.

The woman is the oldest patient among nearly 3.000 robotic surgeries performed at the hospital since 2016 until now.

“We had a multidisciplinary consultation and prepared very carefully to be able to perform the surgery, responding to the patient’s resilience and trust in us,” he said.

The hospital’s surgeons worked with a nutritionist to strengthen the old woman’s physical condition for 10 days before the surgery.

Finally, the surgery was a great success. The tumour was completely removed, the lymph nodes were quickly removed and most importantly, the healthy tissue in the patient’s abdomen was preserved.

Previously, due to signs of black stools and dull pain in the right abdomen, the old woman was taken to a hospital by her family for a check-up.

An abdominal CT scan showed a tumour in the right colon and many surrounding lymph nodes. The biopsy result after an endoscopy confirmed that this was a cancerous tumor.

This caused the old woman to have poor appetite, anemia, and her body to become increasingly emaciated and lose weight.

In addition, the patient also had a heart rhythm disorder.

She was discharged from the hospital and had to be hospitalised for a blood transfusion every two weeks.

After careful consideration, she decided to go to Bình Dân Hospital for robotic surgery in the hope of having a better quality of life and being able to take care of herself.

After surgery, she was cared for and began eating again on the third postoperative day.

She continued to receive nutritional care and physical therapy to help her move early after surgery, increase lung ventilation, avoid vascular and pulmonary embolism, prevent the risk of pneumonia and prevent nastomotic leakage.

The patient's abdominal ultrasound on the seventh postoperative day showed a clean abdomen with no fluid. She was discharged on the 10th postoperative day.

The female cancer patient thanks the doctor for his surgery to save her. — Photo Courtesy of the hospital

She thanked the doctor for giving her life again.

“I felt tired when I first had the surgery, but it gradually decreased, and now I feel healthy,” she said.

Worldwide, colorectal cancer is the third most common type of cancer in men and the second most common in women, with approximately 1.8 million new diagnoses in 2018.

In 2018, approximately 881,000 deaths were attributed to colorectal cancer globally.

In recent years, thanks to the experience of interdisciplinary coordination and the application of surgical robotic systems, the hospital has successfully treated gastrointestinal diseases, especially gastrointestinal cancers. Many elderly patients with weakened physical strength can still successfully undergo cancer surgery. — VNS