My Journey with Farrah - Alana Stewart [12]
Dr. Jacob didn’t waste a minute; it was all moving quickly. Today I went with Farrah (Ryan and Joan stayed behind because there was no room in the van) and one of Dr. Jacob’s team from the clinic to Frankfurt to meet Dr. Thomas Vogl, a much respected surgeon and radiologist and a professor at Goethe University. Farrah would be undergoing a procedure called chemo embolization, in which chemo is injected directly into the tumor to shrink it down to manageable size. It would later be removed by laser surgery. If there are multiple tumors in an organ, as there are in her liver, they use the same technique but “perfuse” the chemo throughout the organ—in essence, they bathe the liver in chemo. Although they’re starting to do it in the States in trials, Dr. Vogl has been doing these procedures for over fifteen years and is known to be the master of them.
The waiting room and hallway outside his office were filled with people waiting to see him, but fortunately we were taken right in through a side door to where he was waiting for us. Dr. Vogl is a very tall, angular man with a balding head and glasses, attractive in a professorial sort of way. He is very precise, very detailed, and gets right to the point. I asked him if he would mind me filming the meeting, and I assumed that he would have a problem with it, but he was fine. These Germans are so different from doctors in the States! He explained briefly to Farrah what the procedure would be. She’d go right away for an MRI, come back to his office to go over the film, and then head straight into the operating room. Like I said, it all moves so quickly here.
Once Farrah had the MRI, Dr. Vogl brought us back into the office and put the film on the screen so we could see exactly where the tumors in her liver were. There they were: the invaders making my friend so ill.
We were escorted to the operating room, where Farrah put on a gown in a small adjoining cubicle and was taken by the nurse to the operating table. Of course, she was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? But she still seemed fearless. I would have been freaking out. Here she is in a strange country with a doctor she’s just met, getting ready to go through a procedure that she knows very little about. Her courage astounds me.
Dr. Vogl gave me permission to film the entire procedure, which surprised me again. I put on a heavy lead apron that weighed a ton, because of the radiation that was emitted by the machines. Farrah had her rosary in her hand, clutching it to her heart, as they started the IV and pain medication. Dr. Vogl marched in and it began. They don’t put you completely out, for some reason we could never quite understand. “I like to talk to my patients—who else would I talk to?” Dr. Vogl explained with his dry wit. Farrah went along with it, trying to be strong; I would have demanded they knock me out.
He gave her an injection of a local anesthetic in a very long needle, which, by Farrah’s reaction, must have been painful. Then he took a scalpel and made an incision in the artery in her right groin. Blood actually spurted up into the air like a fountain. Ordinarily I would have fainted at the sight of that, but somehow being behind the camera buffered the effect. He inserted a small wire tube into her artery and manipulated it with a small machine all the way into the liver. There were four monitors above her, showing what was happening inside her body. I’d never seen anything like this before and it was fascinating. Then he took the syringes of chemo and injected them into the tube, which took them directly to the liver. He did the same thing with the primary tumor in the anal area, and before we knew it, he was done.
“That is it. It is over,” he said. Then he pulled off his gloves and mask, and went immediately to his next procedure. Apparently he does fifteen to eighteen of these a day.
Farrah was sleeping lightly, so she wasn’t in any pain, which I was thankful for, and we were taken to a recovery room nearby where she would sleep for a few hours. After four hours, if there was no bleeding, she could leave