The bathroom scale said Kevin Daly was losing weight, but his belly was getting larger and larger. He didn’t drink beer, so he didn’t think a beer belly was to blame.
What lay inside was much worse than a lot of beer. In Daly’s abdomen was a 32-pound cancerous tumor. It had been growing there for more than a decade.
Before the diagnosis, Daly went to his doctor in October 2017 to investigate the mysterious growth. After fighting with his insurance company to get an ultrasound, which came back inconclusive, he fought with them again to get a CAT scan. It wasn’t until December that doctors finally found what ailed Daly.
This is Dr. Julio Teixeira with the tumor. Courtesy of Lenox Hill Hospital
“It was the biggest I’ve ever seen,” Daly’s surgeon, Dr. Julio Teixeira, told Newsweek. “It’s difficult to even wrap your hands around this tumor.” It was 32 centimeters by 32 centimeters by 36 centimeters in volume.
“When they finally cut me open it kind of sprang out,” Daly told Newsweek.
Daly went in for surgery to remove the enormous tumor at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. While the tumor was cancerous, the cancer had not metastasized.
“Imagine the tumor is a watermelon, and all the red inside the watermelon is fat and all the seeds are cancer,” Daly explained. The cancer is still protected by that shell,” Daly explained. “You just don’t want to cut into the watermelon.” Otherwise, the cancer cells could leak out into the rest of his body.
The tumor had affected one of his kidneys, so the surgeons removed the kidney as well after getting clearance from Daly’s wife.
Pope Francis meets and blesses Kevin Daly. Daly miraculously had no symptoms except an enlarged paunch when a 32-pound tumor overtook his abdomen. Courtesy of Kevin Daly
Miraculously, the slow-growing tumor didn’t disrupt or envelope any organs except the one kidney. “It is surprising,” Teixeira explained. “Often when tumors are this big they tend to invade structures.”
Teixeira thought that, as the tumor took so long to grow—maybe 10 or 15 years—it slowly inched his organs away from his abdomen, and his body had time to adjust. That could be why he didn’t seem to have any symptoms other than the enlarged gut.
Daly has a different theory. “The fact that I had no medical problems from that, the only thing I can go back to is I got married for the second time in Rome,” he said. “My wife and I were lucky enough to be physically blessed by Pope Francis, we actually met him, and that’s the only way I can explain it.”
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