A recent paper in European Urology reports the first (known) case of an “intra-abdominal combustion” during a robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALP).
According to the paper by Di Pierro et al., intra-abdominal oxygen instead of intra-abdominal carbon dioxide was used to inflate the abdominal cavity during surgery.
About 90 minutes after the surgery started, the plastic covering of a pair of special scissors started to burn, presumably because they had overheated in the oxygen-filled cavity during surgical coagulation.
The authors report that, “After extinguishing the fire, we promptly withdrew and changed instruments before recognizing and resolving the cause of the incident. The procedure was carried out without patient injury, and the postoperative period was uneventful.”
It has to be said that this patient (and indeed everyone else in the operating room) may have been extremely lucky. Fire in an oxygen-rich environment can be explosive under some circumstances. The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink is pleased that this incident was, in fact, not a more serious problem.
It is worth remembering that life is complicated — and so is surgery. Sometimes things go wrong despite every effort to avoid such errors.
Filed under: Management, Treatment Tagged: | fire, oxygen, RALP, side effect
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Certainly of interest. I sent this to our local robotic surgeons.