ALLENTOWN (AP) - When Mary Clancey first noticed she was "getting a little plump," as she calls it, she thought it was perhaps from her time working the fudge counter at her local Boscov's Department Store in Pottsville.

She would soon realize the situation was far more serious, resulting in a five-hour operation to remove a 140-pound cancerous tumor from her abdomen."Things started getting harder to do - harder to walk, harder to stand - and then one day I couldn't get out of bed," the 71-year-old grandmother said. "My son said, 'Let's call an ambulance and take you out of here.'"A CT scan revealed a cyst in one of Clancy's ovaries had grown into a 140-pound, stage-one-cancer tumor, equal to almost half her weight. She was 365 pounds in total at the time.Clancy jokes that she felt that she was just becoming "one of those little, 'roly poly' ladies."But she was in for a huge surprise."The results of Mary's CT scan are permanently ingrained in my mind," said Dr. Richard Boulay, LVHN's chief of gynecologic oncology, who performed Clancy's operation. "The mass was so big it didn't even fit in the picture of the scanner - I had never seen anything like it."The surgery had to be carefully orchestrated by Boulay and his team to account for the sheer logistics of removing a mass that large from Mary's body. He was assisted by Randolph Wojcik, MD, LVHN's chief of plastic surgery. In five hours, Mary lost 180 pounds of tumor and tissue - literally half her body weight.After recovering under the close watch of LVHN's care team for 26 days following the procedure, Mary is a more petite 147 pounds today. But her personality is still larger than life."I was going to be a short, fat, round little old lady before, so you never know, I might just turn into a voluptuous babe now," she said.For Boulay and the team at LVHN who witnessed Mary's incredible story firsthand, the real reward is seeing her happy, healthy and on the road to a fulfilling retirement."When someone like Mary grabs your hands a couple of days later and says, 'Thank you for giving me my life back,' it doesn't get any better than that," Boulay said.