Easy As

I am in a hotel room in sil­i­con val­ley. It smells like money. I am here to learn how to oper­ate using a robot. The sur­geon sits in a con­sole away from the patient and looks through a 3D mon­i­tor and con­trols three ooer­at­ing arms and a cam­era. Four limbs. It feels like play­ing an organ con­nected to an octo­pus that is work­ing inside a human. It is like work­ing at the table with all the range of motion of my wrists but through 1/4 inch inci­sions. One can even just do all the work through one inci­sion hid­den in the belly but­ton, mak­ing it look like…nothing. Like I wasn’t there.

When I started in surgery I thought I would always be enam­ored with being inside some­one. This is like being a thief and steal­ing organs while the per­son gen­tly sleeps. When they awaken some­thing is a lit­tle off, some­thing miss­ing here. Hey! Where’s my gallbladder!

In spite of the unbe­liev­ably intense tech­nol­ogy that brings an enor­mous hydra-like con­sole into a per­son with me ten feet away it really is as easy as rid­ing a bike in that the move­ments feel instinc­tive, bal­anced, famil­iar. For a guy who blew every last quar­ter of his high school bus­boy income on aster­oids and felt bad about it, I feel vin­di­cated. Some­thing in me knew what skills I was look­ing for. And another sev­eral thou­sand peo­ple were work­ing away to bring me and a robot to you to qui­etly and joy­fully remove some­thing that isn’t work­ing quite right. I gotta say, I am amazed. Feels like I am in the next cen­tury. Spock, go get Bones. We are beam­ing down.