Father, son each undergo complex surgeries
BY AMBER SMITH
Working together, Upstate surgeons saved a father and his adult son from two different types of cancer, about a year apart.
“It was very much a team effort,” surgeon Kristin Kelly, MD, said of the two operations, which were among the most complex for herself, Mashaal Dhir, MD, and Thomas VanderMeer, MD. She said it is unusual for two family members to need care for two different and aggressive cancers that are not genetically related.
The surgeons worked together on both cases because in big operations, “there is a lot of thinking on our feet,” Kelly said. “Sometimes it helps to have multiple brains thinking about approaches.”
Brian MacDavitt, 75, worked for 35 years at the Auburn Correctional Facility. He’s been retired for 20 years.
He went to a routine doctor’s appointment in the fall of 2021, and because his skin and eyes were yellowed, he was directed to the emergency department at Upstate. Jaundice can be a sign of an urgent liver or bile duct problem.
“I was feeling great,” MacDavitt recalled. Then medical images and tests revealed pancreatic cancer. He would need a complicated surgical procedure. (Learn more about the so-called “Whipple” procedure here.) His operation, led by Dhir, lasted about 14 hours.
MacDavitt wasn’t sure he would survive. In addition to the cancer, he has diabetes and heart disease. “But they caught it early,” he said of the pancreatic cancer, and the surgery was a success. Surgeons removed part of his pancreas, intestines and bile duct.
After he recovered, he took chemotherapy for six months under the direction of oncologist Bernard Poiesz, MD.
MacDavitt’s son, Christopher, 43, helped care for him at the family home in Auburn.
One morning in the fall of 2022, soon after the elder MacDavitt completed chemotherapy, his son awoke in a panic. He’d gone to bed feeling somewhat ill. Now his chest was tight, he was gasping to breathe, and his belly was distended.
“It looked like I was pregnant,” Christopher MacDavitt remembered. “I had a tumor that ruptured overnight, and it ended up freakishly growing.”
His father drove him to the emergency department in Auburn. From there he was airlifted to Upstate. With a large mass in his stomach, doctors placed MacDavitt in a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit. His kidneys were failing, and he was bleeding internally.
“We had to do what we could to get the bleeding to stop,” VanderMeer said, explaining that trauma surgeons opened MacDavitt’s abdomen to relieve the pressure. VanderMeer and Kelly devised a surgical plan.
“Despite the circumstances and the fact it was far from ideal, we felt we needed to remove the tumor,” he said. “It was quite an extensive operation” involving the pancreas, spleen, part of the stomach and colon. The tumor weighed about 17 pounds.
MacDavitt says it was adrenal cortical carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that starts in the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys. “I’m lucky even to be alive,” he says.
Before he was discharged, more cancer was found in his lungs. So MacDavitt had four six-day courses of chemotherapy under the care of medical oncologist Rahul Seth, DO. He also began having medical scans every three months.
In March 2024, cancer came back, this time in his liver. “The same people who saved my life before saved it again,” he said of Kelly and VanderMeer. “They had to remove 20% or 25% of my liver with the tumors.” He also credits nurses on multiple floors of the hospital with helping restore his health.
MacDavitt is now back to work, at FedEx. He takes oral chemotherapy, and he continues with the regular medical scans. “I’m doing good now,” he said. His oncologist agrees. “The prognosis is good,” Seth said. “He seems to be tolerating it well.”
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Cancer Care magazine.
