Buz McPhail of Fayetteville was feeling fine, enjoying an active lifestyle in his retirement. But he couldn’t
shake the feeling that cancer might be lurking in his body. A smoker for 53 years, with a long career spent working around chemicals, he knew he was at risk. He decided it was time to get checked out and scheduled a screening. “Sure enough, there it was,” he said. “A five-millimeter spot on my right lung. It was cancer.” Although he’d expected to hear it, the news was tough to absorb. But he was grateful to have a plan, and the next stop was surgery. Fortunately for him, the surgery was a robotic thoracoscopy with lobectomy. That’s quite a mouthful, but in essence it means the surgeon would be working with a tiny camera and a specially designed robot. During this procedure, the patient is under general anesthesia, completely unconscious. The surgeon makes four small incisions in the patient’s torso, which are used to guide a tiny camera and some surgical instruments into the body. These instruments are then attached to the arms of a revolutionary surgical system called a da Vinci robot. The surgeon sits at a video console nearby, controlling the robot’s every move. The pieces that need to come out are carefully cut away and pulled out through one of the incisions. “It used to be an open procedure,” said Alberto Maldonado,M.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon at Cape Fear Valley Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery. “For a long time, the nearest place to do it this way was Raleigh.” An open procedure meant having a long incision to heal, and the surgeon’s own hands inside the body instead of the small, precise instruments of the da Vinci. Bringing this technology to Cape Fear Valley has given Fayetteville-area patients better access to a much easier recovery. “It means a lower length of stay at the hospital,” said Dr. Maldonado. “With the open surgery, patients would have to stay for about five days. Now it’s about two days.” There’s also less need for donated blood, less scarring from incisions, and significantly reduced pain and discomfort in the recovery time. McPhail said that all rings true to him—he woke up from surgery feeling pretty good. “I really had no pain at all,” he said. “I’ve broken bones before and this was nothing like that. I felt great.” After some radiation “just to be on the safe side,” McPhail says his cancer is just a memory. He’ll continue to follow up and make sure it stays away. But in the meantime, his life is just about back to normal. “I feel fine,” he said, “I’ve been out keeping the yard clean, playing golf, all of that. I’m glad I got checked out.”