Gandma had colon cancer. They just cut ist out.
Grandpa has liver cancer. Has to go through chemo.
Why cant they just cut out the liver cancer. The liver can heal Right?
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Big tumors can be identified using imaging techniques (MRI, CT etc.) and can be removed if accessible. But single cancerous cells cannot be seen on a scan and will continue dividing and a new larger tumor will form. Often these single cells or small groups of cells will have spread from the primary tumor. Cancer sucks
Issue is the spread with cancer, if its caught early enough in an isolated tumor then it can be operated on and removed, once it gets to the later stages it spreads to other organs and surgery isn’t viable so Chemo is the next stage
Cutting out a tumour can be very difficult to do without damaging/destroying the rest of the organ it is in or the surrounding tissues. This can be due to access problems, how fragile the tissue is where the tumour is, or that there wouldn’t be much organ left after removing the tumour and enough healthy tissue around the tumour which you need to to do to try and make sure you got all of the tumour.
If the cancer has spread then it can be too hard to find it all and there would be too much damage removing all of it from everywhere it has spread too.
Tumors at a certain stage start releasing cancerous cells into the bloodstream that float along, attach onto random surfaces in other organs, and start growing new tumors there. The liver is attached to lots of blood flow that goes everywhere in the body, so this is a big concern with liver cancer. If the tumor is somewhere hard to reach with surgery, or if there is a risk that the cancer has released “tumor seeds” into the rest of your body, surgery by itself isn’t going to wipe them all out and flooding the whole body with chemo (which poisons tumors *wherever* they are) becomes the best option.
Because tumors aren’t always like skin tags that are well defined where you know exactly where they begin and end. If you miss a part of a tumor you’ve cut it open and now there’s a possibility one of the cancer cells inside the tumor can break free and deposit itself somewhere even harder to operate on.
In addition to what everyone else has already said, you’re talking about grandparents. Some people are not healthy enough to undergo general anaesthesia or general anaesthesia for a long time for a long complicated surgery trying to remove all the bits while maintaining the organs. The liver is needed to recover from general anaesthesia, if they remove most of it he may never wake up.
You also don’t need a colon at all to live, some people have the whole thing just removed (and a colostomy bag instead). You do need a liver to live. The tumour could be on a key part of the liver that can’t be removed and have the liver still functional.
If we can just cut it out, we do. That cancer is considered operable. Inoperable cancer an be cut out.
When cancer grows, it can get tangled up in all sorts of organs, and removing it could cause too much damage to surrounding organs. It’s also possible that the cancer metastasizes, meaning a piece of the tumor (as small as a single cell) and then gets stuck somewhere else in the body to start growing a new tumor. These new tumors can’t be detected because they’re too small, so if they exist, cutting out the existing tumor won’t do any good, but chemo works on the whole body at once, so it will hit those hidden tumors. They also usually won’t cut out the larger tumor to see how the cancer responds to the chemo. If the large tumor shrinks significantly, then all of those small ones are likely gone, so chemo can be ended and the tumor can be removed.
Other commenters have answered thoroughly, but one detail I wanted to add on the whole cancer spreading business is that it doesn’t just spread into adjacent body parts, it can get into your blood stream, at which point it can crop up pretty much anywhere, and any sort of precision in removing it isn’t going to eliminate it very well anymore.
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