Some doctors told her removing her tumor through surgery would be too complicated.
Last year, Chavez had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor and has undergone further surgery and radiation in Cuba since.
Her brother, Jose Figueroa, 35, said his sister overdosed on oxycontin after undergoing brain surgery for a tumor and using painkillers.
It hints that investors, instead of pouring money into the next cancer-drug startup, may want to place their bets on companies developing better tumor imaging and minimally invasive surgery techniques that could have a bigger impact.
Michaela Banck, a pancreatic cancer expert at Mayo Clinic, said there are two reasons to undergo surgery for such a tumor.
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Fortune said Jobs had considered not even having surgery to remove his tumor, but eventually went under the knife, undergoing what is known as a Whipple procedure.
Paula Van Riper, who was diagnosed in late 1999, underwent hip replacement surgery to remove a large tumor.
If chemotherapy and other non-evasive methods to kill the tumor cells do not work, then surgery will be required.
When Jane Nichols had surgery to remove a large tumor from her colon in 1999, she vowed to do everything possible to stop the cancer from coming back.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the nation's highest court, had surgery today to remove a cancerous tumor from her pancreas.
The brain tumor is highly resistant to standard treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
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During that surgery, Friedman removed most of the tumor.
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Conventional vets, meanwhile, tend toward more extreme surgery because it's easier to remove the entire tumor this way.
More than a decade after the tumor was discovered, 5.8 percent of the men who received surgery had died from prostate cancer or its treatment, compared to 8.4 percent of patients where doctors just kept an eye on the tumor.
He was cured with surgery, and there was another case where a medical technician stuck herself with a syringe, got a tumor in her hand, and then there was also a case back in the 1920s of a medical student named Henry Vadaneaux (ph) who stuck himself with a syringe.
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