Mickey Underwood A massive benign tumor was removed from a man, completing a giant lipoma surgery in Russia. The man lived for years with a head-sized tumor on his neck.
A Russian man walked around with a lipoma the size of a human head attached to his body for 16 years. Not months. Years. Sixteen of them. Finally, he got surgery to remove what had become a massive benign growth that somehow didn’t kill him but definitely changed his life.
A strange head-sized lipoma case
Lipomas are fatty tumors that usually stay small and harmless. This one had other plans. The fact that his body tolerated something that huge for that long raises questions doctors are still trying to answer. How does someone function with that kind of weight? What made him wait so long? The medical photos are the kind that make you wonder how the human body can adapt to almost anything.
The psychological side might be even stranger than the physical one. Living with a visible growth that massively affects everything from how you move to how people look at you. Getting it removed after nearly two decades must feel like shedding a second person you’ve been carrying around since the late 2000s.
Years of living with it before the giant lipoma surgery for a man in Russia
Medical oddities are found all the time, but this one takes the cake for 2025. Because lipomas are typically small and harmless, this man didn’t bother to have the growth removed, but it grew to the size of a human head and was coming out of his neck. This meant he had no way to hide it, which made moving around difficult and made how others viewed him extremely uncomfortable. It’s amazing he waited 16 years before having the extreme lipoma removal surgery, leading doctors to wonder how his body handled one of the most unusual medical conditions ever seen.
The man tried treatments for the growth
The fatty tumor sticking out of his neck grew to be as large as his own head, which had to make it uncomfortable at the very least. The 65-year-old man claimed he tried using simple ointments to treat the tumor when it first appeared, but had no success with those. The size of the tumor led to the giant lipoma surgery that was performed in Russia, and could be the medical oddity of the year. Doctors at the Kirov Regional Clinical Hospital were amazed at the size of the growth.
Where do lipomas typically grow on the human body?
Typically, a lipoma is simply a lump of fatty tissue that grows between the skin and a layer of muscle. They are usually doughy and can be as much as one to two inches, but have been known to continue to grow out of control. There aren’t any folk remedies or ointments to solve lipomas, which means the only effective treatment is surgical removal of the growth.
A terrible location for a lipoma
The location of the giant lipoma that required surgery in Russia is precarious because it was near a cluster of major blood vessels and nerves. It grew out of the back of his neck, which means some nerves that connect to the spinal cord are nearby and had to be taken into consideration. Because of the lipomas location, the surgery required near-perfect precision by the team of doctors performing the surgery.
Drawing a line for the giant lipoma surgery in Russia
Doctors had to place the man on his side and draw a line around the tumor to provide their best guess regarding where the man’s neck should be without the tumor attached. This was the largest lipoma of its kind ever removed by the hospital, but it did not invade the surrounding tissue, according to the doctors performing the surgery.
Successful removal of the lipoma
The surgical team performing the giant lipoma surgery in Russia was successful. The cause of the mass wasn’t identified, but these tumors can simply begin as a small patch of fatty tissue and grow out of control. There have been many cases of larger tumors being ignored because people simply learn to live with them.
The man who had this large lipoma will have a changed life going forward. Without such a large growth on his neck, he should be much more comfortable and look normal, giving him back a relatively normal lifestyle after the giant lipoma surgery was successfully completed at the hospital in Russia.
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