An effective procedure for the treatment of kidney cancer is radical nephrectomy. There is the removal of the entire kidney with the surrounding adrenal glands and the lymph nodes during the surgery. Depending on whether the kidney doctor performs full or partial nephrectomy, radical nephrectomy surgery takes two to four hours to complete. It takes almost 3 to 6 weeks to recover from the surgery.
Partial nephrectomy and complete nephrectomy are two types of radical nephrectomy procedures. A nephrologist in Kolkata removes the entire kidney in the process of complete nephrectomy, while he/she removes only diseased tissues from the kidney, leaving the healthy ones in partial nephrectomy. From the body of a donor person, the kidney doctor removes the healthy kidney during donor nephrectomy and transplants it into a recipient’s body.
Kidney cancer first affects the cells within the small tubes inside the kidneys in the case of adults. The poor growth of kidney cells is the reason behind kidney cancer in children. The following are some factors on which the number of kidney tissues to be removed depends.
- The area of the kidney to which cancer has spread
- The functioning of the kidney
- The presence of one or more tumours inside the kidney
Before the treatment
You need to go for several types of screenings and testing procedures so that the doctor can evaluate the condition of your kidney and know if you have any other health issues. You should have important discussions with your kidney specialist in Kolkata on the treatment, the recovery time and the duration of your hospital stay. You may need to stop having certain medications and start taking some new medications required for the surgery. It is important that you should not eat anything from midnight to the time of surgery. You can take only small sips of water with the medicines as suggested by the doctor.
The procedure
You will go to sleep before the operation under the effect of general anaesthesia. The surgeon will place a catheter in your bladder to help in drainage. He/she will make a large incision in the patient’s abdomen, lower back and side to get access to the kidney in case of an open radical nephrectomy. The surgeon makes another cut across the side, below the rib cage. This is done to examine the surrounding tissues and lymph nodes and whether cancer has spread further. The completion time of the surgery is two hours.
There is the use of a minimally invasive procedure in laparoscopic radical nephrectomy. The surgeon makes several “key-hole” incisions in the abdominal cavity and inserts a laparoscope and other surgical instruments to perform the surgery. For the removal of smaller and localized renal tumours, the laparoscopic procedure is very effective. This procedure has a lot of benefits in comparison to open radical nephrectomy. The benefits involve lesser pain, shorter hospital stay and quick recovery.
