New lease of life to 17-yr girl after critical surgery
The Statesman | 5 August 2025
A team of doctors comprising surgical gastroenterology experts and anaesthesiologists of SSKM Hospital as well as Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGME&R) gave new lease of life after performing a critical surgery for more than eight hours on a 17-year-old adolescent girl.
The girl was suffering from critical solid pseudopapillary neoplasm (SPN) of pancreas disease showing symptoms abdominal pain, vomiting and bleeding through rectum since 2024. She had developed a growth of a huge tumour in her pancreas, according to her USG of whole abdomen report.
But the tumour burst suddenly because of the delay in medical treatment deteriorating her health condition with severe anaemia triggered by bleeding through rectum.
She was taken to the School of Digestive and Liver Disease (SDLD) at the SSKM Hospital where Prof (Dr) Sukanta Roy, head of surgical gastroenterology department, started her treatment.
Prof Roy and his team members Dr Sujan Khamrui and Dr Hemava Saha considering deteriorating health condition decided to perform a critical surgical procedure to remove the tumour.
The surgeons led by prof Roy and anaesthesiologists Prof (Dr) Tapas Ghosh, Dr Saikat Bhattacharya and medical technologist Sudip Ghosh performed the operation following ‘Whipple procedure’ and extracted the extra growth from the head of her pancreas.
“The whipple procedure is the most complicated surgical method for such type of tomour in the head of pancreas, which initially doesn’t manifest any symptoms. We have extracted the growth of more than about two-and-a-half kg from the affected zone in the pancreas. The extracted tumour has been sent to a laboratory for the cancer confirmatory biopsy test. We are awaiting the report,” a senior member of the team of doctors said.
“The condition of the patient is stable and it’s probably the rarest case of surgery in eastern India,” he said.
The SPN of the pancreas is a rare, low-grade malignant tumour that primarily affects young women. It is characterised by a combination of solid and cystic areas, with a central pseudopapillary structure formed by cell accumulation around blood vessels.
Whipple procedure is a complex surgery primarily used to treat tumours in the head of the pancreas, but it can also be used for other conditions like chronic pancreatitis. During the procedure, surgeons remove the head of the pancreas, the duodenum (first part of the small intestine), the gallbladder, part of the bile duct, and sometimes part of the stomach.