A robot helping patients in our area go home
one day after having a kidney removed.
We first visited Robert Carey at his home
near Danville. You can see the Geisinger Medical
Center just over the hill. He chose to build his
home here, so medical care would be close by.
One day in November he passed blood
in his urine and had it checked out. "The first
episode I ever had, showed up on November
8th, which was the week were going to Las Vegas
for our anniversary vacation. Doctors said
go have a great time. Came back did the CAT
scan and they said now you're going to have a
operation."
Then Carey had to choose, a standard surgery
that requires a 5-inch incision and takes
about 3-months to heal, or a robot-assisted
miniumally invasive surgery. He chose the Da
Vinci robot.
His surgeon, Dr. Brant Fulmer , "We were able
to hopefully remove the kidney through a very
small, probably about a 2-inch incision, instead
of high up on his side, we move it down below,
to a much lower, less painful location."
This surgeon finds procedues like this get
patients back on their feet faster. He thinks
robots will change the way doctors will be
trained. "I think the problem we would face
is, we're going to have to train residents
to do both, minimally invasive surgery and open
surgery. That is a bigger challenge."
When you look into the operating
room you see large robotic arms moving,
almost like a video game. The surgeon uses
the tiny scalpels to cut tissue protecting the
kidney. Dr. Fulmer, "You take a complicated
procedure and you break it down under
magnification into small simple little steps."
This retired engineer knew he might have a
problem and attacked it like most
engineers. He found the root cause,
analyzed the root cause, and took aggressive
action. "I had an event that
indicated an issue, there were no symptoms and
even today. If I hadn't had this one event,
I wouldn't have known I had the cancer."
Carey's advice to others, check
with you doctor at the first sign of a problem.
