Press Date: 02/18/2010

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In tonight's female focus, we focus on one of the most common operations women face-a hysterectomy. Last year, 70,000 of them were performed with a distant cousin of R2D2, the divinci robot. Here at Riverside Hospital a growing number of women are opting for this high-tech tool.

"Being a loan officer and a commissioner loan officer your livelihood is dependent for your job."

When Nancy was told she needed a hysterectomy after two years of pain and excessive bleeding, she was concerned about missing work. So her doctor recommended using a robot.

"I said what?"

Riverside Dr. Uma Ananth gets that reaction a lot.

"I don't want a robot to do a surgery on me, they want me to do the surgery and I have to convince them that yes I am the person that is performing the surgery."

The Department of Health and Human Services say that by age 60, one out of every three women will have a hysterectomy. Increasingly those operations are done with the help of a robot. Dr. Ananth sits across the room and works the controls of a giant machine. It performs her actions with flexible instruments while she has a real-time 3-D view of inside the patient.

"It's not the robot that's doing the surgery, it is the surgeon that is using the robot to provide control."

She operates through four tiny slits and when she's finished patients need just four to five days to recover and not eight long weeks like traditional surgery.

"The pain is so much less, the blood loss is less and scar is much less."

"They actually have you up and moving around out of bed that day of the surgery and of course I was anxious to get home because I was feeling fine the next day."

Healing fast and back to work just like Nancy wanted.