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Surgeons: At the Edge of Life

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Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing science - and the human body - to its limits.

Transforming patients' lives, at the cutting edge of medicine. Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing science - and the human body - to its limits.

Series 2

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Until 03/01/2009 BBC Two Wales (analogue) was known simply as BBC Two Wales. BBC Two Wales (digital) was BBC 2W. From 03/01/2009 BBC Two Wales schedules on both analogue and digital became identical

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Ruth Shurman

Richard Bond

Nabila Hussein

Mat Davidson

Shaun Dooley

Katharine Patrick

Stuart Bernard

Debbie Vile

Kathy Lee

Chris Beresford

Surgeons: At the Edge of Life: Series 2: Getting Better

Getting Better

BBC Two - Surgeons: At the Edge of Life, Series 2, Getting Better

A surgeon removes a woman’s oesophagus and uses her own stomach to replace it.

A surgeon performs the most complex operation in his field: removing a woman’s oesophagus and using her own stomach to replace it. Another team tackles a hard-to-reach tumour.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, surgeons with highly specialised skills perform intricate operations that promise to be life-enhancing for their patients.

When 44-year-old AnnMarie was just a toddler, she accidentally drank bleach, which caused severe damage. She has been struggling to cope with her badly scarred oesophagus ever since. AnnMarie has trouble swallowing and visits hospital several times a year to have her oesophagus stretched. It is a highly uncomfortable procedure in which a balloon is inserted into the oesophagus and inflated. 

Now AnnMarie has opted to have an oesophagectomy, even though the procedure is high risk and over 30 per cent of patients have serious post-operative complications. Her surgeon is Ewen Griffiths, one of the Queen Elizabeth’s leading consultant upper gastro-intestinal surgeons, who has spent years mastering one of the most complex and risky operations in his field: an oesophagectomy. In this three-stage procedure, the patient’s oesophagus – the 25-centimetre feeding tube, which joins the throat to the stomach - is removed and their own stomach is used to replace it. The procedure can last up to eight hours and involves three different operating sites in the neck, chest and abdomen.

Consultant colorectal surgeon Simon Radley also performs highly specialised operations in his field: complex colorectal cancer. His patient is 64-year-old retired grandmother Hazel, who has a colon tumour that has spread into her liver and abdominal wall. Without the operation Hazel will have only a few months to live, but there is an outside chance that surgery could remove the cancer entirely and cure Hazel of her disease. It is not yet clear if the cancer has advanced into other internal organs and Simon will only find out once he operates. If it has spread further, then Simon knows he will not be able to remove it entirely. But if it is confined to the bowel, liver and abdominal wall Simon believes he might just get the result Hazel and her husband Alan are pinning their hopes on.

The surgical teams need all their skill and years of experience to get the best possible results. As consultant upper GI surgeon John Whiting says, in demanding cases like these, “good enough actually isn’t good enough”.

Surgeons: At the Edge of Life: Series 2

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Knowledge, drama, comedy and the arts for a broad adult audience.

BBC Two is a lively channel of depth and substance, carrying a range of knowledge-building programming complemented by great drama, comedy and arts.

Factual

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

Surgeons perform extraordinarily complex and risky procedures to transform lives.

Surgeons perform extraordinarily complex and risky procedures to transform and save their patients’ lives. The pressure is intense as they push the boundaries of modern medicine.

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