The patient’s only symptom was severely itchy hands and feet. That’s what brought Dawn, a 65-year-old Medford retiree, to the emergency room at Virtua Voorhees Hospital — and what led doctors to find a walnut-size tumor on her pancreas.
She was transported that same night to Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden to see Dr. Ely Sebastian, a pancreatic and hepatobiliary surgeon. After more testing, he had a clear message for her.
“Dr. Sebastian said, ‘It’s curable. It’s operable. Let’s get it done,’” Dawn recalled.
Then came a twist: a scan turned up a second, unrelated tumor in her breast. Her care team decided the pancreatic cancer posed the more immediate threat and needed to be treated first, with breast cancer treatment to follow as soon as possible afterward.
On May 5, Dawn became Sebastian’s first robotic Whipple patient — and Virtua became the first health system in New Jersey and the greater Philadelphia region to offer a robotic-assisted version of the Whipple procedure, a complex surgery used to treat cancers of the pancreas and nearby structures.
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The Whipple procedure, formally known as pancreaticoduodenectomy, is used mainly to treat pancreatic cancer, particularly tumors in the head of the pancreas, though it can also address cancers of the bile duct and duodenum along with some benign conditions like pancreatitis. It involves removing and reconstructing parts of the pancreas, small intestine, gallbladder, bile duct, and sometimes part of the stomach. It’s named for Dr. Allen Whipple of Columbia University, who first performed it in 1935.
The robotic version is minimally invasive, with the surgeon operating through several small incisions instead of one large opening. Sebastian said that distinction mattered directly for Dawn’s case.
“If we’d performed the traditional Whipple, Dawn would have had a bigger incision, many more days in the hospital, and a greater likelihood of hernias or other complications,” he said.
Instead, Dawn left the hospital six days after surgery — and said she felt well enough to go home by day three. “Once I got home, I had no pain and didn’t take any pain meds,” she said.
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Sebastian, a member of Virtua Advanced Transplant and Organ Health, said the robotic approach’s precision is what sets it apart.
“Robotic Whipple is a very important advancement for people who need this complicated surgery,” he said. “Whipple surgery involves multiple organs and requires a great deal of precision. Robotics bring greater precision, which can result in better outcomes and fewer complications.”
The surgeon controls robotic arms fitted with specialized instruments, guided by a high-definition 3D camera that displays magnified, live views of the surgical site. That combination can reduce blood loss, post-surgical pain and scarring, and typically shortens recovery to about a week, compared to several weeks for the traditional procedure.
Sebastian uses the da Vinci 5 platform, the most advanced robotic-assisted surgery system currently available, which is now standard across the Virtua Health network. Virtua was the first health system in the Eastern U.S. to make a large-scale transition to the da Vinci 5, and Sebastian has performed robotic-assisted procedures for several years, including robotic liver and other pancreatic surgeries.
“At Virtua, we’re providing more specialized surgeries than most other area health systems in our region,” he said. “Offering world-class care close to home is a top priority for us as an organization.”
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Dawn will undergo chemotherapy through December to ensure no pancreatic cancer cells remain, after which she’ll return to Virtua for breast cancer surgery. In the meantime, she’s back to taking regular walks and spent the summer at her family’s shore house, with hopes of returning next year to Saint Martin in the Caribbean, an annual trip she and her husband of 38 years have taken for three decades.
“I knew in my heart and mind that Sebastian was the only one I’d trust to do this procedure,” she said. “He knows what he’s doing. He made me feel so comfortable and always took the time to answer any questions I had.”
