CBS News
Posted: 2008-03-25 12:15:35
Filed Under: Health News
(March 24) - "I feel like I'm alive," said 63-year-old Brooke Zepp.

That's something she didn't think she'd be able to say nine months ago. Zepp was diagnosed with a rare and fatal cancerous tumor. It was entangled in arteries and buried so deep in her abdomen it was considered inoperable, CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports.

Dr. Tomoaki Kato, a transplant surgeon at the University of Miami, saw it differently.

"If you try to remove the tumor in the usual way, it's going to cause damage to the organs that are supplied by all these arteries," Kato said. "So we just took everything out of the body."

During a groundbreaking 15-hour surgery, Dr. Kato's team opened Zepp's abdomen like the hood of a car and took out the entire engine: her stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver and large and small intestines.

The organs were chilled while surgeons detangled the two-inch tumor from Zepp's aorta, the main blood-supply to those organs - and two other arteries.

Once the tumor was out, the organs, connected to new Gortex blood vessels, went back in.