Steady Hands: The World Through a Scalpel

11/22/17  It was a day I will remember for the rest of my life. With little exception, no-one plans to have surgery in their life. For the majority, the news comes suddenly, unexpectedly, and with a fair amount of anxiety. Though, once the nerves settle and one is able to become accepting of their situation, the best thing anyone can do is use their strength to be positive and optimistic about what is to come and how they can grow from the experience. For me, tearing my ACL while playing the sport I love was completely devastating. There was nothing more I could do besides attend physical therapy regularly to regain my strength in preparation for surgery and wait for the day that my journey towards recovery would begin. For more reasons than one, I had been looking forward to November 22, 2017 since my accident roughly a month and a half ago. Rather than dreading what has happened to me, I've aimed to use my injury as an opportunity to learn about myself and the medical field.

In today’s day and age of surgery, the question of “man vs. machine” has taken a stance in medical journals and hospitals around the world. To be quite honest, the idea of having tiny, matrix-like surgical robots pulling organs in and out from a patient’s body and performing sutures at lightning speed is not all that unthinkable. In only 3,500 years we’ve gone from ancient Egypt where physicians performed complete invasive surgeries with little anesthesia on the patient’s side to today where laparoscopic surgery is more or less a standard for many procedures. Consider: just two years ago Nasa worked on a project with the American medical company Virtual Incision to design and develop a robot that can be placed inside a patient’s body then be controlled remotely by a trained surgeon. Whether we are comfortable with it or not, surgical technology is always advancing and becoming more developed. With that, I’d argue that interested surgeons have to reflect seriously upon the ever-shift