Source: www.smh.com.au
Author: Kate Aubusson

The cancerous tumour growing at the back of Brian Hodge’s tongue was about as hard-to-reach as cancers get. The 73-year-old was told he’d need radical, invasive surgery to remove the 50¢-sized tumour. His surgeon would make an incision almost from ear-to-ear and split his jaw in two for the 10-12 hour surgery.

After five days in intensive care, another three weeks in hospital and four to six months recovery, re-learning how to eat and talk Mr Hodge would have been left with disfiguring scars, and a voice that he may not recognise as his own.

“My kids didn’t want me to have it,” Mr Hodge said. “But I’m not one to throw in the towel … Then the unbelievable happened,” he said.

Mr Hodge became one of the first public patients to undergo robotic surgery for head, neck and throat cancer at Nepean Hospital, the state’s only hospital offering the service to patients who can’t afford private healthcare.

Mr Hodge’s surgeon, Associate Professor Ronald Chin, performed the trans oral robotic surgery (TORS) by guiding the robot’s arm into his patient’s open mouth to remove the cancerous tumour.

“I went in on Monday morning for the surgery and I was discharged Tuesday night,” Mr Hodge said of his surgery performed on June 19.

“It’s just amazing. Two days compared to six months recovering.

“What’s got me is that before it was only available to people who could pay the big money. I’ve worked all my life, I’ve paid tax and I think, why can’t we people get this surgery as well,” he said.

TORS is available for private health patients in other NSW hospitals, but its use at a major tertiary hospital in Sydney’s west – surrounded by suburbs with some of the highest smoking rates and lowest private health insurance rates in Sydney – was significant.

“It’s an enormous step forward to be able to offer this state-of-the-art treatment with such obvious benefits both cost-wise and [avoiding] disfigurement-wise … to patients who may not have previously had the resources to access it,” Dr Chin said.

The da Vinci robot Dr Chin used was the same one Nepean Hospital’s urological surgeons use to perform prostatectomies on prostate cancers. The TORS procedure takes about 45 minutes.

“Traditionally surgery is incredibly invasive. We had to make very large incisions across the neck, then lift the skin well above the lower lip and cut the jaw open,” said the otolaryngology, head and neck surgeon.

“We’re talking about a massive operation. Then reconstruction is very difficult.

“Not only did people face a horrendously long operation, they had to deal with long post-operative recovery and rehabilitation to regain speech, language, voice and the ability to eat and drink.

“With TORS, patients can go home the next day [with minimal discomfort],” he said.

More than 400,000 cases of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas are diagnosed each year worldwide. The five-year survival rate for head and neck cancer in Australia is 69 per cent, according to government estimates.

Nepean Hospital would see between 10 and 15 patients with head and neck cancers per year who would be suitable for TORS, Dr Chin said. The cancerous tumours, usually linked to smoking and excessive drinking as well as the human papilloma virus, were “extraordinarily difficult to access, almost impossible”, said Dr Chin.

Robotic surgery costs significantly more than traditional surgeries. But Dr Chin said TORS could save the public health system up to $100,000 per procedure, where patients no longer needed to spend days in ICU, costing more than $3000 per night, or weeks in hospital. The robotic surgery is primarily indicated for patients with oropharyngeal carcinomas of up to four centimetres in size. Roughly one-third of TORS patients will not need chemo and radiotherapy.

“The early evidence available on trans oral robotic surgery for oropharyngeal cancer is promising,” said Dr Tina Chen, medical and scientific adviser at the Cancer Institute NSW.

“However, higher-quality research is needed to definitively say whether it means better clinical outcomes for patients, compared to other treatments already available,” she said.

There was currently no high-quality evidence from randomised controlled trials comparing TORS to chemotherapy and radiotherapy for these types of cancers, a 2016 Cochrane review concluded. It noted “data are mounting”.

Mr Hodge will soon be able to swap the pureed food he has eaten since the day after his surgery for his favourite meal, barbecue chicken, and the avid karaoke singer is already planning his first post-surgery crooning set-list. First, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me, and the song he has been singing to his wife for decades, Anne Murray’s Could I Have This Dance.