A man’s beer belly turned out to be a 30-pound tumor, which a surgical team removed over the course of over four hours.
Kevin Daly, a financial planner from Hoboken, had open-heart surgery in 2015, and lost 34 pounds right after as a result. However, he felt something was amiss when his protruding belly refused to shrink, New York Daily News reports. Daly, 63, said, “I thought they literally left stuffing and tools in me from surgery.”
He said that everyone dismissed his paunch as a “beer belly,” which is visceral fat that stubbornly sits around the stomach as a result of changing hormones and age.
Daly said, “I don’t even like beer. I was lean. I’m 6’3″ and very athletic.” Through diet and exercise, Daly, who was a former varsity jock at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, was able to go down to 198 pounds from 230 after his surgery.
His intuition nagged at him, and Daly eventually convinced Dr. Varinder Singh, the chair of cardiovascular medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, to take a CT scan, even if his insurance company refused.
It turned out that a 12-pound tumor had grown in Daly’s midsection, leaving Daly “vindicated and scared.” But during the surgery, doctors were astounded to find that the tumor was actually three times larger than they originally estimated. The 30-pound mass had also wrapped around one of Daly’s kidneys.
Two residents had to hold the tumor while Dr. Julio Teixeira painstakingly cut it out. Teixeira remarked that this is the largest tumor that he has ever removed. He said,
It’s one thing to see the picture. It’s another thing to actually have it in your hands. Now they tell me it took ten to fifteen years to grow. And they never really get to that size (because) something else usually fails.
Daly said it is a “gigantic relief” that his scans show his organs in their proper places. “Now, they’re all in the right place. Before the surgery, my left descending colon was pushed under my sternum. I could touch it through my skin to make my food digest.” He added, “I’m back down to my college weight, which is awesome.”
