Bogart’s arm and hand were “swollen to four times their normal size”, she added. There was also a “terrible black thing [placed] in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.”
“He looked so unlike Bogie — still mercifully unconscious… enclosed in another world, protected not by me, but by those raised bedsides, with those bottles and tubes sustaining life.”
Typically, if a tumour is very small and confined to the outer layers of the oesophagus, and hasn’t spread, cancer can be removed with just the surrounding tissue, as explained by Mayo Clinic.
But in cases where the tumour is malignant, as with Bogart, they may have to do either a esophagectomy – where a portion of the oesophagus, and the upper part of the stomach and nearby lymph nodes are removed – or an esophagogastrectomy.
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