This Monday I travelled to La Coruña, in the North-West of Spain to participate in three surgical sessions with the new High Power Greenlight HPS laser. We conducted two surgical sessions, Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning at the Abente y Lago Hospital, training two prestigious colleagues from La Coruña. We did six operations in total. All cases were very satisfactory. This hospital belongs to the Juan Canalejo Healthcare complex, and they mainly do short stay surgery here.
On Tuesday afternoon we went to the Modelo Hospital in La Coruña, where we performed another operation, that was also uneventful. The truth is that it is a great pleasure and honor to help my colleagues to perform their first steps with the greenlight, specially when they are such outstanding pupils, and learn so fast.
Anyone reading this blog might ask what moves me to travel so much and to train so many urologists, today here, tomorrow there, always on the move.... it is really a big effort, and something must justify this huge effort.
Well, what really moves me to do this is that I learn a great deal in these training sessions. First, because I am training seasoned urologists, who know a lot and have seen a lot. They share their views with me. I learn much from them and ultimately they become good friends. Secondly, each prostate is different (I have not seen two prostates that are exactly the same), and the fact that we review once and again the basic concepts of endoscopic laser surgery, and that I explain thousands of times why hold the scope this way, or how fast to rotate the fiber, or what is the ideal working distance, how to approach a median lobe, how to avoid and handle complications, etc... helps me reflect and understand more deeply and grasp the immense amount of details that one should know to perfom this operation with excellence.
This technique is evolving constantly, getting better and better. We learn day by day how to make it better and safer. It will change the current worldwide panorama of the surgical treatment of BPH (Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia). In my opinion, classic surgical techniques, open prostatectomy and TURP (Transurethral resection of the prostate) are obsolete, but they are being performed and offered to patients in hospitals worldwide, and many patients still suffer the secondary effects and complications, sometimes very severe, of these classic operations.
It is a true adventure to be able to play a part in this movie... operating so much, in so many theatres, having the opportunity to interact with urologists, nurses, patients all over Spain and the rest of the World is really a privilege and an enriching activity. More importantly, this enables me to learn more and to be able to offer my patients a better operation, safer and more close to perfection.
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