#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 12 Technology: A Miracle of Modern Medicine

 As it happens, this week’s topic of technology coincides with my personal experience of a technology miracle in the field of medicine: robotic surgery. So, I thought I would record my experience for the benefit of my grandchildren who will probably be injecting nanobots for their surgeries and laughing at how primitive this was!

After a diagnosis of endometrial cancer at age 75 (never a happy event), my oncologist recommended a radical hysterectomy, removing everything in the vicinity of my uterus. Of course, this induced some understandable anxiety for me. 

However, my doctor told me that she could perform the surgery with robotic assistance and, as a result, the procedure would be less invasive, involve less bleeding, cause less pain, and have a shorter recovery time. The robot would also allow the surgeon an enhanced view of all those organs inside my body and let her make more precise movements. I thought all of those sounded good.   

When the day came for the surgery, I was pretty insistent that the anesthesiologist not knock me out until I had a chance to see the robot which could produce these amazing results. And he obliged.  I got to “meet” DaVinci before being sedated.  I mean I was curious, but I didn’t really want to witness DaVinci's prowess on my own body. I confess I did watch a video of this kind of procedure after the fact, and it was amazing. 

As you see from this picture (which is not of me), DaVinci has long metal arms, one of which holds a camera.  The other three hold various surgical tools which the surgeon can manipulate through very sensitive hand controls. These tools are inserted through “ports” (holes) in the abdominal wall.  No, I’m not going to include pictures, but take my word for it, I had some bodacious bruises across my stomach, especially at my belly button which apparently was the ideal spot for a camera. (One of the resident doctors told me later that he had worked quite a long time on reconstructing my belly button, and he hoped I appreciated his plastic surgery skills.  It was apparently so unusual that they took a picture to go in my chart.  And promised me it would never appear on Insta! What a way to go down in the annals of medical history.)

The good/great news was that after seven hours of surgery (found more disease than they were expecting; must have been exhausting for the surgical team), there was surprisingly little pain for me and no big bandages. Not saying it felt great; it was really, really uncomfortable.  But nowhere near what I was afraid it might be considering the extent of the surgery. And after a very few days, I didn’t even really need the extra-strength acetaminophen the hospital sent home with me, much less the narcotics I had been prescribed for previous surgeries.  Mostly, I felt exhausted even though I had the easy part of just lying there unconscious. Fortunately, after one night in the hospital with a lot of TLC from the staff, I had the luxury of being able to go home and sleep as much as I wanted. 

I’m sure that had this surgery taken place a few years earlier, before the advent of robotics, the recovery, and maybe the whole outcome, would have been quite different. I’m very grateful to the skilled surgeon and her team and also grateful that I lived in the right time and place to benefit from the amazing technology of robotics.

So, in tribute to this miracle of technology, which saved my life, I offer the following little ode, with deep apologies to Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan:

I am the very model of a modern medical miracle.

I’ve bruises and some portals that you see are all quite spherical.

I have glue and stitches on my skin,

And several missing parts within,

I’m swallowing acetaminophen.

I am the very model of a modern medical miracle.