“The turtle” is gone.
To help 5-year-old Teresa Hammann face a brutal regimen of chemotherapy and prepare for surgery, her father began calling the tumor in her right shoulder “the turtle.”
“She can understand the analogy. We tell her we?re using chemotherapy to attack the turtle and make it recede back into its shell. Then it?s not biting her,” said Greg Hammann, an oceanographer with GeoEye in Dulles, Va.
Tuesday, a doctor at Johns Hopkins University removed “the turtle” in a 10-hour surgery, but instead of replacing part of her upper arm with a stainless steel rod, they took half of her right tibia, carefully knitting its tiny blood vessels into her existing healthy bone so it can re-grow at a natural rate. The rare and complicated surgical procedure ? vascularized fibular transplant ? is performed by only two doctors in America, and Dr. Kristy Weber has performed it just three times before.
The surgery is widely used in Italy, where it was developed, but has only been performed 10 times in this country, Hopkins spokesman Jeff Ventura said.
“Rather than resort to a metal prosthesis or an amputation, we wanted a biological solution that would grow as she grows,” Weber said. A prosthesis would require additional surgeries every three years or so to replace it with a longer rod.
Weber will graft the part of Teresa?s tibia responsible for growth ? the growth plate ? into her shoulder. Then she will go through 20 more chemotherapy treatments to ensure no cancerous cells spread to other parts of the body.
Bone cancer is rare, affecting 1 in 100,000 people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teresa?s case is particularly rare, as it began in the bone.
Most bone cancers result in other tumors spreading through the body.
If all goes well, Teresa should be able to celebrate her sixth birthday and the end of her cancer treatments in March, Hammann said.
Since the cancer was diagnosed in May, she has gone through 11 cycles of chemotherapy. “She?s doing real good. Better than we are. When she lost all her hair, I thought she?d feel bad, but she thought it was funny,” Hammann shared.
“She still wakes up every morning and makes sure I rub her head for luck before I go out to work.”
