STORY: Meet Cheryl Mehrkar–– the world’s first recipient of a fully robotic double lung transplant.
The procedure builds on other minimally invasive procedures, and is aimed at speeding up the healing process and shortening hospital stays.
Mehrkar has always been an active person.
In addition to her work as an emergency medical technician, she’s a motorcycle enthusiast, and has owned a karate school with her husband.
But for more than a decade, Mehrkar has suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which only worsened after a bout of Covid.
The 57-year-old remembers the moment she knew she was in trouble.
“I remember I had to take a call at a nursing home as an EMT, and the 85-year old security guard got up those stairs better than I could. And I knew, this is not good.”
She spent years looking for help before the NYU Langone Health Center said she was eligible for a lung transplant.
“I knew I needed a double lung transplant. And once they put me on the list, I figured, okay, I have a couple more months to go. And five days later, I got the call. They said they have a 98% match. And how soon can you get here? And my first reaction was, ‘holy, you know what. And I’ll be there in two hours.'”
Mehrkar went under the knife at NYU Langone on October 22.
:: NYU Langone Health
During the procedure, a team of doctors works in tandem with the robot as it removes the diseased lungs, prepares the surgical site for implantation, and then implants the donor lungs.
Dr. Stephanie H. Chang is the surgical director of the Lung Transplantation Program here at the hospital that conducted the procedure.
:: NYU Langone Health
“In a normal transplant, you do either get a very big incision on both sides of your chest, called thoracotomies, or you get just a very big one across your chest where we break your breastbone and it’s called a ‘clamshell.’ And in either case, you have to put in these big retractors that spread your ribs apart. They push on your nerves. And it’s just a very big open incision. And so pain tends to be a decent problem for patients afterwards. In terms of the robotic transplant, instead of something that is probably eight inches in terms of an incision, we can get it down to a two-inch incision and so, and then, we do, we put the small ports in for the robot, so there’s significantly less trauma on the chest wall.”
“So better healing for the patient and less post-operative pain.”
Less than a month after the surgery, Mehrkar is already up and walking at the hospital.
“When I walk around, I don’t need oxygen to do that. And I can breathe. And sometimes my legs get a little tired, but at least I can still breathe. So it’s amazing what it’s done for me.”
As she heals, Mehrkar has had time to reflect on what it means to be the world’s first.
“’Cheryl, we were able to do both lungs robotically. You were the first in the world.’ When you hear something like that, I don’t know how to describe that. That’s, first in the world. What? There’s 8 billion people, and I was the first to have that done.”
Now, just a few days before she is set to be discharged, she’s focused on those who have helped her, including her organ donor.
“All I know, it was a younger male. That’s it. When you think about that, that the family is grieving and two weeks later, I’m breathing with his lungs.”
“This is huge. This is huge. This gave me my life back.”
(Reuters)