Nancy Gay Central Florida News 13, Your Health and Fitness
Having a C-section used to be the common way doctors would remove uterine fibroids, but not any more.
A robot is now making the procedure a whole lot easier.
For three years, Marta Lagoueyte and her husband tried to conceive a child.
"One of the things the doctor found is that I have some myomas, and (they) were causing me not to get pregnant ," Lagoueyte said.
Lagoueyte's doctor said there were two ways he could remove them.
One involved making a large incision in the abdomen and the other involved using the Da Vinci robot, which is used by the Florida Hospital.
"This device allows us to perform large surgeries with very small incisions, or what we call minimally invasive surgery," said Dr. Samuel Brown, a reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist with the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Florida Hospital.
With the Da Vinci, three small incisions are made in the abdomen.
"The patient will have metal trocars placed inside the abdominal wall and these instruments go through these sleeves, or trocars. The trocar sleeve appropriates and through these sleeves the instrument will be advanced and with the robot it allows us to have much more dexterity, precision, in regards to placing sutures in the surgery," Brown said.
Brown spends most of the time during the surgery at a console where he is able to see inside the patient through a monitor and he controls the robot with hand and foot mechanisms.
Lagoueyte said she went home the same day, and while she felt a little uncomfortable, she didn't have a lot of pain.
Now that the fibroids are gone, the Lagoueytes are giving invitro fertilization a shot.
"Hopefully, in nine months we'll have a baby," Lagoueyte said.
Brown said many women have uterine fibroids, and it is not always necessary to remove them.