Cheryl Mehrkar a 57-year-old woman originally from Dutchess County in southeastern New York who enjoys scuba diving, riding her 2003 Harley-Davidson Sportster, martial arts to the point of being a fourth-degree black belt in karate, also dabbling in skydiving and bungee jumping, is the first in the world to have successfully undergone the first lung transplant in a fully robotic surgery that lasted about seven hours. The procedure, which took place last Oct. 22, was led by Dr. Stephanie H. Chang, associate professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and director of the lung transplant program for the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.
“I was pretty worried – it’s an incredible thing,” Mehrkar, enthused to the Post on Wednesday shortly after being discharged from NYU Langone Health. The woman had been diagnosed in 2010 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease involving emphysema and chronic bronchitis, which damage the lungs and restrict breathing.
Specifically, this procedure is much less invasive than a classic lung transplant surgery. In fact, Dr. Chang made several small incisions between the 57-year-old woman’s ribs. Then, using the arms of the innovative da Vinci Xi robotic system, Chang removed both diseased lungs and, after several other medical procedures, performed, again using the robotic arms, the implantation of lungs from a donor.
“The benefits of this instrument definitely involve significantly smaller incisions, thus better healing for the patient and less postoperative pain,” Chang said. The surgeon added about the robotic instrument, “It is a milestone for us physicians, but double-lung transplantation is different. We had to improve the technique by making it short enough and efficient enough to be able to perform the implantation of two lungs quickly enough without doing any damage to the new organs.”
“It was a positive and healthy experience,” the thrilled patient recounted, confiding that she now plans to write a letter to the family of the man who donated her lungs.
