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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_procedure. If you are a visual learner, check the illustration here: http://www.patientedu.org/aspx/HealthELibrary/PrintOnly.aspx...

"A Whipple involves removing the head of the pancreas, the duodenum, the common bile duct, the gallbladder, and often part of the stomach (see illustration). Surgeons then seal off the end of the small intestine and reattach what's left of the bile duct, pancreas (body and tail), and stomach."

It sounds like something Dr. Frankenstein would do.

It is a major rearranging of your guts, with potentially severe dietary restrictions for life.

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It's something that my father-in-law had to go through a couple of years ago (the all "let's take out half of his intestines away"). Ironically, he was later diagnosed as not having had pancreatic cancer, which is good, because he's still alive. But yeah, it's a hell of a surgery, he was on the surgery table for 7 hours straight and after a couple of hours the main surgeon just wanted to give up, but somehow my brother-in-law bribed the lead-nurse and she convinced said surgeon to do his best, which he did (this is Romania, things like these happen).

The idea that a surgeon can 'give up', then a nurse be bribed to convince the surgeon to 'keep going', is more terrifying than the surgery.

Unfortunately, it's something seen much too often in Romania, and in many third- and second- world countries.

There was an oncologist speculating on Quora that Jobs had to have the Whipple because he waited so long and the cancer presumably spread. Had he acted promptly it would have been a much less complicated surgery.

To each his own though -- whatever drove Jobs to seek alternative medicine first is part and parcel of the personality that gave us all he did.

He had to have the Whipple because of where his tumor was located (the head, not the tail, of his pancreas).

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