Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who underwent pancreatic cancer surgery in 2004, may be headed back to the operating room to remove his pancreas, a doctor Thursday told financial publication Bloomberg.
Wednesday’s announcement that Jobs would leave for a six-month medical absence could indicate complications from the earlier surgery that removed portions of the pancreas, bile duct and small intestine, said Robert Thomas, head of surgery at Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
Although Thomas isn’t intimately familiar with the health condition of the Apple founder, the medical expert told Bloomberg that a “pancreatic leak” could require the pancreas to be removed and insulin to keep the Silicon Valley icon alive.
“You might have to take the rest of the pancreas out, ” Thomas said. “You’re on significant doses of insulin, and it’s not easy to manage,” he told the publication.
Wednesday, people claiming to be familiar with Jobs’ medical status told the New York Times that he suffered from an inability to absorb food.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
