Seven-year-old Heather McNamara of Long Island, New York is now able to go home after spending more than a month in the hospital recovering from a high-risk surgery that allowed doctors to remove a large tumor in her abdomen.

On Feb. 6, surgeons at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital removed Heather’s stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver and small and large intestines and placed them on ice so that they could be re-implanted after a cancerous baseball-sized tumor was extracted from her abdomen. The surgery lasted for 23 hours.

Unfortunately, Heather’s pancreas, spleen and stomach were touched by cancer. In the absence of her pancreas, the girl is now a diabetic so she will have to receive digestive enzymes and insulin injections. Also, the absence of a spleen affects her immune system, putting her at increased risk for infection. Her stomach was replaced by a pouch fashioned from intestinal tissue which has the role to hold food awaiting digestion in the small intestine. She will have to eat small meals, much like someone who has had gastric bypass surgery for weight loss and take nutritional supplements such as B12 and calcium.

Talking about the risks of performing such a complicated surgical procedure, lead surgeon Dr. Tomoaki Kato told CNN it was the risk of the unknown.

“You don’t know until you begin the operation, whether or not when you take organs out, if you will be able to reconstruct them and put them back in; if not, she will not survive. That was out biggest challenge.”

This is the second operation of this kind. Dr. Kato performed a similar procedure last year on a 62-year-old woman from Florida who is doing very well at the moment.

Heather is now heading home where she will get to play with her dog and her big sister, something she wanted to do for so long. Her mother, Tina McNamara expressed her gratitude towards doctors operating on her daughter thanking them for giving her child back to her.