It's something that my father-in-law had to go through a couple of years ago (the all "let's take out half of his intestines away"). Ironically, he was later diagnosed as not having had pancreatic cancer, which is good, because he's still alive. But yeah, it's a hell of a surgery, he was on the surgery table for 7 hours straight and after a couple of hours the main surgeon just wanted to give up, but somehow my brother-in-law bribed the lead-nurse and she convinced said surgeon to do his best, which he did (this is Romania, things like these happen).