Cancer Surgery

Surgery, when used to treat cancer, is a procedure in which a surgeon removes cancer from your body.

Surgeons often use small, thin knives, called scalpels, and other sharp tools to cut your body during surgery. Surgery often requires cuts through skin, muscles, and sometimes bone. After surgery, these cuts can be painful and take some time to recover from.

Anesthesia keeps you from feeling pain during surgery. Anesthesia refers to drugs or other substances that cause you to lose feeling or awareness. other ways of performing surgery that do not involve cuts with scalpels like cryosurgery, lasers, hyperthermia, photodynamic therapy etc. Surgery may be open or minimally invasive.

In open surgery, the surgeon makes one large cut to remove the tumor, some healthy tissue, and maybe some nearby lymph nodes.

In minimally invasive surgery, the surgeon makes a few small cuts instead of one large one. She inserts a long, thin tube with a tiny camera into one of the small cuts. This tube is called a laparoscope. The camera projects images from the inside of the body onto a monitor, which allows the surgeons to see what they is doing. Special surgery tools is used, that are inserted through the other small cuts to remove the tumor and some healthy tissue.

Because minimally invasive surgery requires smaller cuts, it takes less time to recover from than open surgery.