They removed a tumour the size of a rugby ball and saved his leg from amputation. The patient had been living with a tumour in his thigh for almost 30 years.
But when the tumour began to compress the nerves and nearby blood vessels, he turned to doctors for help. The man was operated on and returned to life without pain at St Luke’s Hospital of the First Medical Association of Lviv.
The patient is 49-year-old Yevhen Plekhanov from Lviv. Doctors discovered the lipoma, a benign formation that develops from adipose tissue cells, when he was 20. The tumour had already overgrown the surrounding tissues of the upper inner third of the thigh – muscles, nerves and blood vessels. To remove it completely would have meant a risky intervention for the patient: he could have lost sensitivity of the entire leg. That’s why doctors at one of the city hospitals removed only a part of the lipoma. They also warned the young man that the tumour could continue to grow.
For the last 15 years, Yevhen lived in Italy. He worked there as a driver. Although he saw that the tumour was growing over the years, due to his inactive lifestyle, it did not bother him much. He was unable to get checked out in hospitals there.
The man returned to Ukraine when the full-scale war started. He volunteered a lot, delivering humanitarian aid to war victims to humanitarian support centres and hospitals. He was constantly on the move. Due to regular loads on the legs, the pain in the upper thigh did not go away and also radiated to the groin. In addition, the limb began to numb. Then Yevhen turned to the specialists of St Luke’s Hospital for help.
The doctors at St Luke’s Hospital performed an MRI scan on the patient and found that the lipoma had almost tripled in size since the first surgery, to 24×13 cm. It had grown in the upper third of the thigh between the muscles, blood vessels, nerves and tendons in the area from the groin downwards. The tumour was compressing the neurovascular bundle and thus impairing blood flow in the arteries of the leg.
“In order to prevent partial or even complete cessation of blood flow in the limb, which would have threatened amputation, we performed a complex intervention requiring high precision and well-developed skills: we separated parts of the tumour from the nerves and arteries, and then removed it completely without complications for the patient,” explains vascular surgeon and head of the Department of Interventional Radiology Oleksandr Holub.
The next day after the surgery, Yevhen started walking. He finally got rid of both discomfort and pain. The man returned to his daily routine. And now, as before, he continues to volunteer to help our defenders at the forefront.