Surgeons: At The Edge Of Life
Surgeons: At The Edge Of Life is a documentary on BBC2. Transforming patients' lives, at the cutting edge of medicine. Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing science - and the human body - to its limits. The most recent episode is from 27 October 2026.
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Surgeons: At The Edge Of Life
Surgeons at Addenbrooke’s Hospital take on life-changing surgery that takes two specialist surgeons two days to perform and involves removing all the organs in the patient’s pelvis.
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Surgeons at Royal Papworth and Addenbrooke's hospitals must put their patients back together again after removing life-threatening lung and facial tumours.
Operations to transform patients’ lives. Surgeons at Addenbrooke’s and Royal Papworth take on a high-risk spine procedure and perform open-heart surgery on an 80-year-old patient.
Operations where even a small mistake is catastrophic. Surgeons at Addenbrooke’s and Royal Papworth hospitals remove a life-threatening tumour and repair a young patient’s aorta.
Series 8
A surgeon has one chance to tackle a life-threatening tumour in his patient’s liver and diaphragm. A neurosurgeon must save her patient from paralysis with unerring precision.
A surgeon must remove his patient’s voice box to save his life, while another takes on a life-changing procedure for a patient with a rare auto-immune condition.
Surgeons drain all of their patient’s blood from his body to replace damaged arteries. A patient’s fertility is at risk without a complex operation to remove diseased bowel.
A surgeon must remove part of his patient’s tongue and reconstruct it to save her from an aggressive cancer, and surgeons perform a rare simultaneous pancreas and kidney transplant.
Surgeons face a difficult dilemma in the middle of a life-saving bile duct cancer operation. A chest sarcoma proves more challenging than expected, with no room for error.
One patient’s rare penis cancer requires a partial amputation, and another patient with severe endometriosis must have a huge cyst and a damaged kidney removed.