A woman from Pennsylvania who thought that she was just gaining weight has dropped to half her size after doctors discovered she was carrying a 140-pound cancerous cyst.
Mary Clancey, 71, a resident of St. Clair, had grown to 365 pounds over the past 20 years, but did not think it was anything worrying, New York Daily News reports. Clancey said, “I just kept getting chubbier and rounder. I went to my doctors off and on. It was just like, keep your mind on your diet.”
Clancey said photos of her aunts and late grandmother showed “short, fat, round people when we got older,” so she thought the drastic weight gain was her “destiny.”
But six months after retiring from working at a candy counter, where she stood for eight hours a day, she noticed that her leg began feeling more pain. A few years before, Clancey had a blood clot in her leg, and the pain made her suspect that the same thing might have happened.
She went to the hospital, where doctors ordered a CT scan and found the tumor. She was moved to Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where doctors spent five hours removing the giant mass.
Dr. Richard Boulay, her lead surgeon, said,
It was slowly killing her.
The tumor was so big, Boulay said, that it didn’t even fit on a CT scan. Also, a second table had to be brought into the operating room so the doctors could take out the cancerous tumor.
Clancey is now just 10 pounds and is cancer-free, though she says she still has some trouble with her leg and uses a walker. But she is thankful for the blood clot and the pain that made her go to the hospital. “A blood clot saved my life,” she said.
Around 40 pounds of skin were removed, as well. The doctors are still investigating what’s causing Clancey’s leg pain, but her life is almost completely back to normal. “I can eat everything. I can do everything. Life is good and everything is in place. But the story is absolutely insane.”
