New lease of life for Zambian accident victim after Gurgaon private hospital’s robotic-aided surgery
The hospital said the team conducted the rare redo surgery of the ureter via Da Vinci robotic-assisted technology to treat the damaged urethra of the patient.
The surgery lasted for three hours and within 4 days the patient was discharged, the hospital added. (Express photo by Amit Mehra, for representation) A team of doctors at a private hospital in Gurgaon successfully conducted a rare and complex robotic-aided urethroplasty on a Zambian accident victim. The hospital said on Wednesday the team conducted the rare redo surgery of the ureter via Da Vinci robotic-assisted technology to treat the damaged urethra of the patient who had suffered a major pelvic fracture and serious damage to his vital organs in a road accident.
The surgery lasted for three hours and within 4 days the patient was discharged, the hospital added.
When the man, 37, was admitted admission at Fortis Gurgaon, he was on a catheter, which was inserted into the bladder through the abdomen, and was unable to pass urine on his own. He had severe disabling complications such as recurrent stricture (narrowing of the urethra), urinary incontinence (leaking urine by accident) and erectile dysfunction. He had undergone a procedure to reconstruct the urethra twice at Zambian-based hospitals, but both times, the procedure did not yield any results. He was advised to be on a suprapubic catheter—a device that’s inserted into the bladder to drain urine—for his entire life.
Giving details of the case, Dr (Prof.) Anil Mandhani, Executive Director, Urology and Kidney Transplant, Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurgaon, said, “During the road accident, the patient’s pelvis to which the prostate is firmly attached got fractured and he was diagnosed with Pelvic fracture urethral distraction defect. When there is a disruption near the prostate in the male urethra, the two ends of the urethral tube move away from each other.”
“During open surgery, it is often necessary to remove a portion of the bone to access the proximal end of the urethral tube. However, joining the disrupted ends can be challenging as suturing may not be perfect. Hence, we decided to do a cystoscopy, a procedure to look inside the bladder using a thin camera called a cystoscope, along with robot-assisted redo (end to end) anastomotic urethroplasty under general anaesthesia,” added Mandhani.
“The robotic-assisted technology made the surgery easier as the doctors could reach the areas where it was very difficult to reach with bare hands. Also, robot-aided surgeries provide ten times magnification of the surgery site. In India, this is the first time a robot-aided surgery is being done in such a case,” he added.
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