The Whipple Procedure

This is our family the day before my mother's Whipple.

Dr. Cameron scheduled my mother's Whipple Procedure for November 29, 2005. My sister Linda said "pancreaticoduodenectomy" to Dr. Cameron and he was very impressed. I'm sure the surgeons and oncologists have a good time hearing people mispronounce all the crazy procedure and drug names. The Whipple itself is very complicated. It can take anywhere from 6 to 10 hours.

My mother was really scared about the surgery and mentioned several times that this whole thing seemed like a dream.

They took my mother away at around 6 am and the family walked with her to the Weinburgh building. We were able to stay with her for a bit while they prepped her for surgery and we met the anesthesiologist who was very kind. Around 7:30am she was off to the OR and we were sent to the waiting room. The Weinburgh waiting area is really nice. There are comfortable couches and TVs around.



They told us that the OR nurse was going to call us every hour or so to give us an update on how things are going. The first update came around 8:30am. The nurse said that my mother was doing fine and that she would call again in about an hour or so unless the operation was over in which case Dr. Cameron would come speak to us. We knew that it would be very bad if Dr. Cameron came out early as that probably meant that they had aborted the Whipple. It's only after they open up the patient when they make the final determination if the tumor is resectable. So the next phone call was nerve racking. At 10:10am the nurse called again and we all looked at each other since nobody really wanted to take it. My sister Linda went to take the call. When she was on the phone she looked upset so I was really worried. But she came back and said that everything was going fine and they were going to proceed with the Whipple! We were all unbelievably relieved.

After about 6 hours into the surgery Dr. Cameron came out and found us. He was in his green surgical outfit. He said that everything went very well and that as far as he could tell they had removed the entire tumor. I guess they do some pathology tests as they are removing the tumor to ensure that everything was removed. He said they removed about 1/3 of my mother's pancreas and about 1/3 of her stomach. We thanked Dr. Cameron profusely. We were told we could see our Mother in the ICU in a few hours after they closed her up.

My mother spent two nights in the ICU. When we first saw her she was in a lot of pain and also was suffering from a lot of nausea. We had one big scare where her hemoglobin levels were very low and they thought that it was either a faulty test or that it could be internal bleeding. The surgeons were ready to go back in if it was the latter case. Thankfully, the test turned out to have been wrong and a different kind of test confirmed her levels were OK. By the third day she was actually looking reasonably good and we were all happy that she was doing so well.