Abigail Adams Smith
When she was 46, she found a lump in her breast.  She moved to her parents' farm in Massachusetts and talked to two doctors, Tufts and Rush.  They told her the best thing to do was surgery.  At the time, there was no good way to make people stay asleep during surgery, so Abigail Adams Smith was awake for most of it.  It took 25 minutes and another hour to close the wound.  She lived for another two years.  But she became very thin and came back to Quincy to die.