This is the monthly update of my robotic surgery practice at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. This months focus is on prostate cancer, with a record 24 dvPS performed this month.
This month I performed 27 robotic surgeries including 24 da Vinci prostatectomies for prostate cancer. Both of these are a record for 1 month in my practice and I had several important firsts.
I performed my first combo major robotic operation on a gentleman who was found to have a UPJ obstruction when he had a metastatic evaluation for prostate cancer. I performed a dvP and a robotic pyeloplasty at the same setting using the same 6 ports I would use for a dvP. The most amazing part of the operation is that each operation took less than an hour (the dvP was a record 46 minutes) and the patient still went home the following day.
I performed my first few dvPs in under 1 hour. Although time is not an important factor, these cases were still done very carefully. My feeling that these cases could not be done quickly with still perfect technique was wrong. With increasing experience for myself, as well as my assistant and nursing team, our times have dropped significantly. Our longest operation was in excess of 3 hours still since some dissections take much more time depending on the anatomy.
I also performed a robotic simple prostatectomy which was the first one under 2 hours.