Surgeon Mandi Beman has her eyes pressed into a console that nurses call a “PlayStation on steroids,” her red Crocs on pedals to cauterize tissue or position her camera and her hands manipulating handles that work like joysticks.
Her patient lies about 10 feet away, with the chopstick-size, clawed hands of a robot in her belly — under the control of Beman, who is slicing, burning, poking and stitching the woman’s uterus to remove eight fibroids.
The Porter Adventist Hospital patient has just three tiny incisions in her lower abdomen, about the size of fingertips, where the arms of the da Vinci surgery robot were inserted to reach her uterus.
“They are like little baby hands in there,” Beman said. “It’s much easier to sew.”
Lynn Halterman, a 43-year-old Englewood nurse, is having her second surgery to remove fibroids, two of which were the size of grapefruits this time — and painful. About 10 years ago, she had traditional open surgery that left a scar on her belly. Recovery took six weeks.
This time, Halterman left the hospital the next day and plans to return to work in two weeks. But her most important reason for choosing the robot: “less pain.”
Leading up to last week’s surgery, Halterman stunned friends when she mentioned a robot — with the help of a highly skilled surgeon — was doing it.
“Everybody goes, ‘Wow! What is that?’ ” she said.
About 20 such robots, which cost from $1.5 million to $2 million, including accessories, are assisting surgery in Colorado, mostly in the Denver area and Grand Junction. Intuitive Surgical, which makes the robot, lists 58 Colorado surgeons trained to use them.
University of Colorado Hospital got its robot nine months ago and is training medical residents to use it to remove prostates and kidneys in patients with cancer, as well as for other procedures. Patients ask for it, said Dr. Paul Maroni, a urologic oncologist and director of robotic surgery.
“For the last five or six years, it’s been fairly common that patients come looking for the robot,” said Maroni, who previously used robots at Porter hospital and Rose Medical Center.
Advantages of the robot include less bleeding during surgery, shorter hospital stays and faster recoveries. But sometimes traditional surgery is still best — like when the tumor on a kidney is in a delicate spot, Maroni said. “You can only twist and turn the kidney so much,” he explained. And, he said, the robot isn’t right for every surgeon.
“I personally believe that it’s just another tool that a surgeon uses; it’s just another machine,” Maroni said. “I just feel like I do a better operation with the robot.”
Robotic surgery is different from traditional laporoscopic — or minimally invasive — surgery because surgeons aren’t standing over the patient. Instead, they sit in the console across the room using a microphone to communicate with surgical assistants and nurses, who position the Star Wars- looking robotic creature above the patient’s body and adjust its plastic-wrapped limbs.
The concept began as a military idea. What if mobile units could pick up an injured solider and rush him to the robot, and surgeons miles away could save him? That hasn’t happened yet, but the robot has U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for several types of surgeries, including gynecological.
Some surgeons like the robot better than traditional laporoscopic tools because the robotic hands have the same range of motion as human wrists. Standing over a patient’s body with laporoscopic instruments is closer to using chopsticks.
Either way, surgeons make much smaller incisions and use computer screens to see what they’re doing inside the patient’s body.
On the robotic console, Beman peers into the eye pieces — which look similar to an opthamologist machine — and gets a three-dimensional view of her patient’s uterus. Everyone else watches her work on two-dimensional computer screens around the room — uterus, small intestines and fibroids blown up 15 times larger than life.
After the fibroids are cut away from the uterine wall, the robotic claws pass a needle and dissolvable thread back and forth, sewing up the uterus. “Woo-hoo!” Beman shouts from the console, her voice echoing through a microphone above the patient’s head.
Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com