‘I’m blessed’: Lake in the Hills woman receives new outpatient robotic surgery for lung cancer

Chris Chirchirillo of Lake in the Hills said she never would have known that she had lung cancer if she hadn’t braved the pandemic to go to an immediate care about a pain in her chest in November.

When a chest X-ray revealed a cancerous mass, Chirchirillo said she was “in complete shock,” gripped by fear, and never would have guessed then that, just a month later, she would be cancer-free and recovering at home with her family.

“I just skated right through it,” Chirchirillo said. “It’s more looking back thinking, ‘That was really something that happened to me,’ because it all happened so quick.”

If the mass in Chirchirillo’s thymus – a lymphoid organ between the lungs – had been found even a year earlier or if she hadn’t ultimately sought treatment at Northwestern Medicine, her recovery would have been a very different story.

Chirchirillo is one of just 24 people to receive the new outpatient robotic surgical procedure used to address lung cancer by Northwestern Medicine, the hospital group’s chief of thoracic surgery, Dr. Ankit Bharat, said Friday.

As one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., lung cancer has been an area of great interest to doctors at Northwestern and the field has benefitted from great innovation in recent years, Bharat said.

But it wasn’t until about six to eight months ago that Bharat’s team brought all of these smaller breakthroughs together into a pioneering procedure that will drastically change the lives of people diagnosed with lung cancer, he said.

Bharat also performed the first lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient, according to a spokesperson for Northwestern Medicine.

Chirchirillo is a retired, “stay-at-home grandma” and a motherly figure to an eight-year-old boy with special needs who she has taken under her wing. She is not a smoker and never expected to have lung cancer, she said. When she was first hospitalized, she said she was extremely nervous.

“I would pinch myself periodically going, ‘Is this really happening to me?’ I kept thinking that maybe this was a dream. It was hard to wrap my head around,” she said.

Once Chirchirillo switched her care to Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital, she said everything was very smooth.

“When you know that you have people working with you and taking care of you so well, I think it just gives you a comfortable confidence that I can’t even explain to be honest,” she said.

The robotic lung surgery Chirchirillo received was inspired by the patients Bharat saw at Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital, he said.

“As we started to figure out how best to help the patients at McHenry, we put all these pieces together,” Bharat said.

From working at the McHenry hospital, Bharat said he learned the area had high rates of emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He also heard from many patients who told him that coming down to the Chicago hospital for surgery and spending days or even weeks in the hospital was not feasible for them.

This made him realize two things, he said. He needed to develop a procedure with a quicker recovery time that could be performed on lung cancer patients with already reduced lung capacity because of preexisting conditions.

Northwestern Medicine had already been working to make lung cancer surgery less invasive as the traditional method involves splitting open a person’s chest and, in some cases, necessitates the removal of ribs, resulting in a lengthy and painful recovery, Bharat said.

About six months ago, Northwestern Medicine developed a way to map out tumors allowing surgeons to be more precise in surgical procedures and eliminating any “guesswork,” Bharat said.

This increased precision allows Bharat’s team to remove just the tumor itself, rather than removing a whole lobe within a person’s lung, he said. This means that rather than losing 25% of lung capacity after lung cancer surgery, patients lose only 8%.

This is important for people with emphysema or COPD as their lung capacity is typically already at 40 to 60% and then they are diagnosed with lung cancer, and so surgery is not a realistic option for them, Bharat said. With his new procedure, they can consider surgery, instead of having radiation or chemotherapy as their only option.

The mapping tool also drastically reduced the amount of time between when a patient is first seen and when they are ready to undergo surgery, he said. The diagnostic test can find lung tumors in 15 minutes and then Bharat’s team proceeds with surgery right away.

Chirchirillo’s initial trip to the immediate care was on Nov. 21 and she had her tumor removed Dec. 22, she said.

“What we’ve done is now we’ve combined all the diagnostic and the treatment on one day and evolved the technique so it’s ambulatory,” Bharat said. “Patients can skip a number of those steps, unnecessary delays. They come in, get surgery and go home.”

The outpatient robotic lung surgery approach reduces the amount of pain patients are in immediately after surgery so that they can be discharged the same day, allowing them to recover in the comfort of their home, Bharat said.

“They don’t have to spend time in the hospital. Especially during [COVID-19], you know, the less time in the hospital the better,” he said.

For Chirchirillo, this meant fewer disruptions to the life of Jaxen, who she said really needs consistency in his daily routine. She had fully recovered from her surgery within a few weeks and said Friday that she feels as good as new.

“I just really feel like my faith and doing the right thing ... that brought me Dr. Bharat, that brought me all these other doctors and all these great people and my story is a happy ending,” she said. “I’m blessed.”

“Dr. Bharat is really the hero of all of this,” she said.

Bharat said he and his team will be publishing scholarly articles about the robotic lung surgery in a number of medical journals in the coming months and hope to share the technique with hospitals in the U.S. and worldwide to better the lives of other people like Chirchirillo.