Cardinal Joseph Bernardin will undergo exploratory surgery next week after test results showed he likely has a cancerous growth in his pancreas, his doctor said Friday.
The tests, conducted Thursday at Mercy Hospital, also showed the 67-year-old cardinal probably has a tumor in his right kidney, according to Dr. Warren Furey, his personal physician.
“It would appear that the cardinal has a carcinoma (cancer) at the head of his pancreas, probably in the bile duct,” said Furey at a news conference at the Chicago Catholic Archdiocese headquarters. “He also has, it would appear, a tumor on his right kidney.”
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of malignant growths, often causing death within a few months of initial diagnosis. In 1991, for example, actor Michael Landon died three months after he was diagnosed with the disease.
Furey said that a team of cancer surgeons at Loyola Univeristy, led by Dr. Jerry Aranha, will probably do the exploratory surgery early next week.
Bernardin has been a popular and widely admired church statesman, both with the 2.3 million Catholics in the archdiocese he has headed the last 13 years, and by Catholics and non-Catholics around the nation and world.
He expressed resigned hope Friday that his condition might not be as bad as the early tests indicate.
“I have been a priest for 43 years, a bishop for 29 of those years,” he told reporters near his Near North Side residence. “I’ve counseled many, many people who faced what I am facing. I am prepared.
“There is some kind of blockage caused by a tumor that most likely is malignant,” he said, while adding its location and early discovery “speaks to the possibility that it could be corrected surgically.”
Furey said doctors who have examined Bernardin are puzzled by the presence of what appear to be cancerous growths on both the pancreas and right kidney at the same time.
Although it is rare for cancer to spread from either of those organs to the other, he said, it would also be unusual for primary cancers to develop independently of each other at the same time.
“We do not yet have tissue to look at, and that’s the only way you can know for sure what is happening,” said Dr. Robert Vogelzang, a professor of radiology at Northwestern University. Bernardin was examined Thursday through a tubular scope passed through his stomach into his small intestine where the bile ducts from the liver and pancreatic ducts meet.
The bile ducts now are obstructed, said Vogelzang, who was called in to review the test results at Mercy. “The appearance of that obstruction is malignant,” he said.
Some patients, but not a large percentage, have survived pancreatic cancer when it is caught early and in the “head” area of the pancreas as appears to be the case with Bernardin, said Vogelzang.
The pancreas is a glandular organ that secretes enzymes for digesting food. It also secretes insulin and glucagon, which regulate levels of sugar in the blood. About 25,000 Americans a year contract pancreatic cancer.
Furey, chairman of Mercy’s department of medicine, said the cardinal called him at home in early May in the middle of the night, complaining of abdominal pains. Initial tests on May 6 showed a growth on the kidney, which was suspected at first of being a stone. There was no sign of an abnormal pancreas.
The findings were repeated in subsequent tests throughout the month, Furey said. But when a discoloration turned up in Bernardin’s urine earlier this week, he went to Mercy for a more extensive test, called an ERCP, where the first signs of the growth on his pancreas showed up.
Furey, who has examined the cardinal annually since he arrived here in 1982, replacing Cardinal John Cody, who died early that year, said Bernardin has generally been in excellent health until now.
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If the exploratory surgery shows the growth on the pancreas is malignant but has not spread to any other organs, Furey said the cardinal would most likely undergo an operation known as the Whipple procedure.
That type of surgery is difficult on both surgeon and patient, according to Dr. Stephen Sener, a Evanston Hospital surgeon and past president of the Illinois division of the American Cancer Society.
“This is a tough operation,” Sener said, “taking at least four hours under the best of conditions, and the patient is in the hospital for 10 days in best of conditions.
“The operation removes half of the pancreas, about a third of the stomach, the duodenum . . . and about two-thirds of the bile duct.”
“If you look at long-term survival for pancreas cancer,” said Sener, who headed an Illinois study on the subject a few years ago, “it is uniformly not good.”
Nevertheless, he said, new treatments have been able to extend survivability fairly dramatically in recent years.
“When I have a patient, cure is not something I can talk to them about,” said Sener.
“The goal is to have them live as long as they can with the best quality of survival that is possible. We’re trying to lengthen the disease-free survival time from the time of the diagnosis to the time of recurrent clinical disease.”
“Until they do the surgery, we can’t talk about the prognosis,” said Dr. Fabrizio Michelassi, a cancer surgeon and researcher at the University of Chicago.
If the growth proves to be cancerous, but can be removed before it spreads, patients in that category recently have had between a 10 and 30 percent chance of surviving at least five years, Sener said.