Bob Brown already had rheumatoid arthritis when he broke his neck in a fall earlier this year.
That meant that when his doctors decided the 71-year-old needed surgery to repair the break, there were added risks.
“I had to think of the worst-case scenario, and I got very nervous and, you know, kind of scared to death,” Brown said.
During his procedure, doctors used a new kind of imaging device. The 7D Surgical System let them see in real time exactly where their probe was in Bob’s spine, said Paul Maurer, the Chair of Neurosurgery at Rochester Regional.
“When we want to lock a spine together that’s been damaged by trauma, that’s been damaged by tumor, we want to put a screw down that very specific pipe,” Maurer said, describing the process by which doctors place surgical instruments in the spinal column.
“There’s not a lot of room for error.”
Maurer said the new machinery doesn’t change how he does surgery, but its real-time imaging ability lets him know that he’s done the operation correctly without having to check with an x-ray after the fact.
Maurer said that reduces the risk of errors in surgery and cuts down on radiation exposure for the patient.
Brown was out of the hospital 48 hours after his surgery. He’s still got a big brace around his neck to hold his spine in place while it heals.
“I feel very good,” he said. But “the collar is a pain in the neck.”
