For 20 Years She Thought She Was Overweight — But It Was Actually a 140-Pound Tumor
Mary Clancey, 71, of St. Clair, Pa., didn’t think much of her weight gain at first. Photos of her grandmother and aunts showed “short, fat round people when we got older.” She figured it was just “destiny.”
No red flags went up when she went for doctors visits, either. Clancey worked for years at the candy counter of a local Boscov’s department store, “I used to make the fudge,” she says. “It was wonderful.”
Her doctors told her to mind her diet and not sample so much fudge. Six months into retirement, Clancey started to notice she was having leg pain, which led to trouble walking. Then one day she couldn’t get out of bed.
At first she attributed the leg pain to a blood clot she’d once had and decided to go to the hospital for an examination. This is when doctors found the massive 140-pound cancerous growth that had been growing inside Clancey’s body for nearly two decades.
Cases of tumors this size are rare but not unheard of. Roger Logan is an example. Logan recently had his own extremely large tumor removed. Doctors had misdiagnosed him for years as simply being obese.
Clancey’s tumor was so large it couldn’t all be captured by a CT scan. “Mary came in with a mass that I’ve never seen anything the size of this before,” said Dr. Richard Boulay, her surgeon.
Dr. Boulay spent five hours in the operating room and needed a second table to complete the surgery. He was able to remove the growth without rupturing it by rolling it out of Mary’s body and onto the other table.
When she checked into Lehigh Valley hospital, she weighed 365 pounds. After losing the growth and 40 pounds of excess skin, Clancey is down to just 180 pounds. Her doctors also say she’s now cancer free.
“I can eat everything. I can do everything,” she told the NY Daily News. “Life is good and everything is in place. But the story is absolutely insane.”
Read more from Yahoo Style + Beauty:
Man Who Doctors Called ‘Just Fat’ Has 130-Pound Tumor Removed
Mom’s Heartbreaking Photo of 10-Year-Old Son Shows Painful Reality of Cancer
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