After two intense days of surgery with Dr. Richard Gastón, I flew to Barcelona, where the Annual European Association of Urology Congress was going to take place. It has been sadly affected by the ash cloud that has kept Europe with most airports closed throughout the week. A disaster as thousands of urologists registered at the congress could not come.

In this congress I presented the video "GreenLEP: GreenLight Enucleation of the Prostate", a very innovative technique that I have developed over the last year, that was very well taken by the attendees. As the moderators for the session had not reached Barcelona, I had to moderate the session as well.

This all begun when Dr. Peter Gilling, from New Zealand, described in 1998 the technique of Endoscopic Enucleation of the prostate with a Holmium Laser and an end firing fiber. This technique, te best studied surgical technique in urology, has demonstrated to have outstanding results in the treatment of BPH in multiple studies, with long follow up. The only problem this operation had was its technical difficulty, the long learning curve that made many centers desist in their intention to use it.

GreenLight Laser, when used for vaporization, is fairly easy to use and this justifies its success and broad diffusion worldwide, and it has demonstrated to be safe, efficacious and well tolerated by patients. My contribution has been to describe a technique that allows to perform the complete enucleation of the adenoma with a green laser, with a side-firing fiber. A new approach and also maybe more simple, that opens new perspectives in this field of urology. We will soon publish our results obtained during this last year, that look exceptionally good.

The company manufacturing the surgical instruments that I use for this operation, Richard Wolf, has helped me produce a training video that was also presented during the congress and that will soon be available for all of those interested in learning this technique.

Then I returned to Madrid by plane, with permission of the ash cloud that has caused so many problems in Europe...