Strawberry Surgery Goes Well; More Will Be Known in a Week

Snippets of diseased tissue were taken to the pathology laboratory at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center late Saturday after Darryl Strawberry’s three-hour surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his colon.

It will be days before doctors know how aggressive the tumor is, and whether Strawberry will require chemotherapy.

Meanwhile, the 36-year-old New York Yankee outfielder will spend a week or so recovering from the surgery, which required the removal of a large piece of colon and a resectioning of the two remaining ends.

Strawberry’s main surgeon was Dr. George Todd, chief of vascular surgery at the hospital. A vascular surgeon would not usually operate on a patient with colorectal cancer, but Todd saved David Cone’s pitching career by surgically treating an aneurysm of his right arm, and he has an excellent reputation as a surgeon. But Saturday’s surgical suite was crowded with assistance from Drs. Kenneth Forde and Richard Whelan, both colorectal surgeons and experts in the field.

While the operation was successful--they removed the tumor, resectioned his colon and sent the specimen off for microscopic examination--post-surgical complications can include bleeding or a leak at the site where the two ends were sewn together. This generally happens in 1% of patients and would require another surgical procedure. It will take about a week to classify Strawberry’s tumor, which some people close to the case believe is more serious than it is being made out to be.

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the United States, with 131,000 new cases diagnosed each year. There are about 56,500 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.

Doctors say that Strawberry’s tumor is quite unusual for someone his age. About 12,000 of the 131,000 new cases occur in people under 50. Also unusual is the way it was discovered. Strawberry complained of abdominal pain for more than a month, and he had mentioned it to childhood friend and fellow baseball star Eric Davis, who was found to have colon cancer in 1997. That was the same symptom that brought Davis in for an evaluation. After surgery to remove the grapefruit-sized tumor, and a round of chemotherapy, Davis was back the same season. Pain would generally indicate that the tumor had spread beyond the wall of the colon. But it is also possible that the stomach pain had nothing to do with his cancer, doctors said.

Colorectal cancer experts say that Strawberry probably harbored a threatening polyp that could have been growing for five to 10 years. “It’s amazing that someone with such incredible energy could have something growing all throughout his career,” said Dr. Mark Pochapin, assistant professor of medicine at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.

The good news, says Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Dr. Alfred Cohen, chief of colorectal surgery, is that even one-half to two-thirds of a missing colon will not have an impact on a patient’s quality of life. Patients generally remain in the hospital for a week, and there is generally dietary restrictions for about a month. Then, patients can begin exercising after four to six weeks, he said.