Surgeons: At the Edge of Life TV Guide

Series 4 · Episode 4

Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge takes on some of the most challenging medical cases in the country. Its surgeons carry out operations that require such expertise that they are only performed here and in a handful of other UK centres. One such procedure is a pelvic exenteration, so complicated it requires two surgeons to perform and two days to complete. The surgeons - colorectal consultant Nicola Fearnhead and consultant urologist Alex Colquhoun - only do around ten of these operations each year, where due to widespread cancer, all the organs in the pelvis need to be removed. It is such a massive, life-changing surgery that about 50 per cent of people who need the procedure for otherwise terminal illness, decide not to have it. This time, their patient is 52-year-old Stuart, a father of two who has already had treatment for bowel cancer. However, the cancer has returned and the pelvic exenteration is his only chance for a cure. It will involve removing his rectum, bladder, prostate, surrounding lymph nodes as well as a large tumour on his kidney. The surgery is so radical it will leave him with no sexual function and needing two stomas; one for waste from his bowel and...