They told him ‘you’re just fat.’ But it was actually a 130-pound abdominal tumour
THEY said it was only fat.
But there was 130 pounds of it, as heavy as a newborn giraffe. What they said was fat descended from his stomach. While Roger Logan sat in an armchair, as he spent too much of the last decade, the mass rested on the floor. When he walked, he described a pendulous and cumbersome sensation, Logan told ABC 23 in a recent interview from a California hospital bed, as though three cement bags had been tied around his neck. It kept the 57-year-old Mississippi man out of the antique store he used to run and away from the shores where he fished, he said to the Bakersfield Californian.
No matter which physician he asked, the explanation for the weight remained the same. “They said, ‘you’re just fat,’” Logan said in the ABC 23 interview. On Facebook, Logan wrote that the mass was too large to be examined through a conventional CT scan or other test.
It would not be until after surgery that Logan was told the 130-pound was not, in fact, just fat. It was a tumour. Vipul Dev, a surgeon at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital, in Bakersfield, California, proposed to the Bakersfield Californian that the 130-pound mass began as an ingrown hair. It was possible the hair follicle became infected, and the tumour swelled to immense size as new blood vessels fed into the site.
After several months of research, Logan’s wife Kitty discovered Dev. The California doctor had previously treated someone with a similar mass. In the past, other surgeons had determined that Logan’s 130pound mass was inoperable. Still, the couple decided that the California medical facility was worth a shot. In late January, they embarked on a 40-hour road trip from their Mississippi home to Bakersfield; Logan sat in a reclining chair, bolted to the floor in the back of a cargo van, the AP reported.
The surgery successfully removed the mass. “We are very fortunate that we can do this surgery with little to no complications,” Dev told ABC 23. Logan put it more succinctly in a Jan. 31 public message on his Facebook account: “Still here suckers!”
In February, Logan began a two-week rehabilitation therapy programme in California, part of his long road to recovery. The last time Logan “hurt this much and was this tired,” he wrote on Facebook on Saturday, “I got hit by a school bus.”
At 130 pounds, the tumour was massive - but not the largest ever recorded. In 2014, Beijing doctors excised a 240pound tumour from the back of a man with neurofibromatosis. And in 1905, Texas doctors treated a woman with an abdominal cyst weighing 328 pounds.
It would not be until after surgery that Logan was told the 130-pound was not, in fact, just fat. It was a tumour. Vipul Dev, a surgeon at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital, in Bakersfield, California, proposed to the Bakersfield Californian that the 130-pound mass began as an ingrown hair. It was possible the hair follicle became infected, and the tumour swelled to immense size as new blood vessels fed into the site.