Chyle Leak Complication

Tina29

my MIL went in on the 17th to have her Thyroid n some lymph nodes removed due to Cancer. During the surgery you Thoradic Duct got damaged and caused a Chyle Leak. They tried to go in and fix it and thought they did but it still was leaking. The just did a Third procedure that took 8 hrs and still did not fix it. Has anybody had this happen? They are saying that they need to figure out what to do next.

Tina29

sorry for the misspelling but it’s been a long day

wbcgaruss

Hello, Tina, yes, I had a Chyle valve leak after surgery on the left side of my neck for lymph node cancer that was not encapsulated in the node and was spreading.

I had a drain ball on the left side of the surgery, and due to the Chyle valve being damaged, it would just let the lymph fluid through unrestricted and would fill the drain ball quite quickly.

I also had several procedures to attempt to stop it, such as taping balled up towels on it to compress and put pressure on it to hopefully eventually stop. I also had a couple of operations in one session that did not work either.

Days went by, and I was feeling pretty hopeless.

Then a thoracic surgeon came in and explained that the main feed line to the Chyle valve comes up from your abdomen area on the right side of your body up to somewhere in your chest area. Then it crosses over to the left side of your chest/neck area, where it connects into the Chyle valve.

He told me he was going to make some small incisions on my right side around the area of my abdomen and go in and bundle this Chyle Valve feed line with other tissue, don't quote me on this exactly, but he was going to bundle it with something and tie it or pinch or squeeze the feed line that connects to the Chyle Valve somehow and restrict the flow substantially or cut it off possibly.

And this is exactly what he did, and it worked; the constant drainage from the damaged Chyle Valve stopped. What a blessing it was to have this stopped. This was a major roadblock to moving forward with recovery and being released from the hospital because, as fast as I was getting liquids pumped intravenously, it was draining out the damaged Chyle Valve just as fast.

Your MIL is probably in this same situation.

I had this done at Hershey Hospital in Pennsylvania, a teaching hospital.

https://www.pennstatehealth.org/locations/milton-s-hershey-medical-center

The doctor who performed this procedure on me was Michael F. Reed, MD.

https://www.pennstatehealth.org/doctors/michael-f-reed-md

A wonderful guy, friendly and with a great demeanor. You would never know he was a high-ranking surgeon, he reminds you of the friendly neighbor next door, and he explained the whole procedure to me ahead of time and even had a drawing on a whiteboard showing the path of the Chyle feed line and how he was going to perform a procedure and most hopefully a solution and where he was going to insert instruments, etc., a full explanation.

It was only later on that I found out that he is chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, a professor of surgery at Penn State College of Medicine and the program director for the Thoracic Surgery Residency program.

I then realized I was Blessed to have one of the best doctors around to have operated on me.

I also did a little search online and came up with this…

MANAGEMENT OF CHYLE LEAK FOLLOWING HEAD AND NECK SURGERY: REVIEW OF CURRENT TREATMENT STRATEGIES AND ALGORITHMIC APPROACH TO THE TREATMENT

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10218081/

And also this…

Management of Chyle Leak after Head and Neck Surgery: Review of Current Treatment Strategies

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/8362874

Also, this article discusses it I think…rather technical…

Introduction

Chyle leak (CL) after head and neck surgery is an infrequent but known complication, which presents in up to 2%–8% of neck dissections [1]. Due to the variable anatomy and fragile tissue of the thoracic duct (TD) [2], the inadvertent iatrogenic lesion is the most common cause of postoperative cervical CL [1, 3, 4].

Indocyanine green-assisted chyle leak identification and ligation after left carotid-subclavian bypass: a case reportOpen Access

https://academic.oup.com/jscr/article/2026/3/rjag192/8541250?login=false

I am going to stop there. Here is a link to the search I did online, and there are more results dealing with this situation. You can check them out if necessary.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=surgery+to+fix+chyle+valve+leak+after+lymph+node+surgery+on+neck&t=ffab&ia=web

I am sure they can get this leak stopped, and I hope something I offered here helps out.

If you have more questions, let me know.

I hope I explained it well enough.

Wishing You The Best

NEGU (Never Ever Give Up)

Take Care, God Bless

Russ

wbcgaruss