Well, guess what? I had the incredible opportunity to experience it firsthand! The Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) in Baltimore, Maryland, hosted a “Robot-Assisted Surgery Open House”, surgery done with the help of a robot! I’m inviting you to come along on this exciting journey as I got the chance to try my hand at it.
I had no idea what to expect before I got to GBMC. What is robot-assisted surgery anyway?! Are robots taking over the job of doctors who specialize in operating? Well, not quite! It turns out that a real surgeon, Dr. Emily Watters, was going to show us how she sits at something called a surgeon console that lets her control the robot’s arm movements while performing an actual operation. After her demonstration, she was going to give everyone at the open house a chance to try it out themselves.
The surgeon console had many different and interesting parts to it. There was a computer with finger loops, joysticks, and foot pedals that carried out your movements through to the robot’s “arms” on the nearby tower. These arms held different kinds of tiny surgical instruments that performed the surgery on the patient lying on the nearby operating room table.
After Dr. Watters showed us around, it was surgery time! I put my head into the console, which was adjusted to my height and view, and my robotic surgical assistant got the signal that the “operation” was ready to begin on a fake “tummy.” Inside my patient, instead of real organs, like a spleen, liver, and heart, there were different colored spikes that looked like small mountains. My job, as the “surgeon,” was to place each of the rings precisely onto the spikes without touching them. I felt like I was playing a ring toss game at Chuck E. Cheese, rather than performing an actual operation!
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