Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    A CANCER death sentence has been turned into a story of hope and recovery for a 37-year-old man who underwent a world-first surgery at the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital last June.

    Experts at several other hospitals told the cancer patient, identified by his surname, Pan, that he had only two years to live, but thanks to a Hong Kong surgeon and some Internet sleuthing, Pan is doing well one year after the surgery that saved him from liver and pancreatic cancer.

    The surgery was a novel, two-stage hepatectomy, or Associating Liver Partition and Portal Vein Ligation for Staged Hepatectomy (ALPPS), combined with a Kausch-Whipple procedure, which had never been performed at the same time before, the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital said Friday.

    Pan learned in March 2014 that he had pancreatic cancer with metastasis of the liver, the same cancer that took the life of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

    A hepatectomy would be the preferred treatment for Pan’s type of cancer but it requires such a patient to have at least one-third of the liver in a normal state. Three-fourths of Pan’s liver, however, had already been invaded by the cancer.

    Surgeon William Sharr with the Shenzhen hospital told Pan that the ALPPS procedure, originally done in Germany in 2012, induces liver growth.

    Sharr has performed the ALPPS procedure successfully in Hong Kong six times.

    If the doctor could induce healthy liver growth and then perform the required surgery to treat the cancer, Pan would have a chance at survival.

    “At that moment, the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital’s doctor William Sharr and his team told me that I cold have ALPPS, which might give me a 50-percent chance of survival,” Pan told reporters Friday.

    Pan received the first stage of the hepatectomy April 15 last year and nine days later the normal part of his liver, which took up only about 26 percent of his whole liver before the surgery, grew quickly.

    Pan’s liver grew as large as 40 percent of the size of his original liver.

    In late April, he underwent the combination surgery: the second stage of the hepatectomy and the Kausch-Whipple procedure to remove the cancer. Pan was kept in intensive care for four days after the surgery.

    Pan was released last June and has been recovery well over the past year.