‘Sciatica was gone’: hospital performs robot-assisted spinal surgery in Canadian first

London Health Sciences Centre was home to the first ever robot-assisted direct lateral spinal surgery in Canada. Dave Myen said when he woke up from surgery, the sciatic was gone.

Dave Myen didn’t think much about being the first patient in Canada to receive a robot-assisted direct lateral spine surgery two months ago. He was just looking for anything to relieve the pain.

Now he says he feels thankful the robot enabled minimally invasive surgery and reduced recovery time.

“When I woke up from surgery, the sciatica was gone. It’s just amazing.”

He still has about four months to go until the fusion of his impacted vertebrae is considered complete, but he says everything is progressing well.

Myen suffered from chronic back pain that led to sciatica in his right leg and extreme pain in his lower back, impacting his daily life “to the point that the shooting pain in my right leg caused me to stumble and fall.”

After numerous visits with his family doctor, chiropractors and massage therapists, he ended up at London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ont., as the first patient in the country to undergo the procedure with the Mazor X Spinal Robot.

“Normally when we do back surgeries we put the patient on the operating table when they are facing downwards,” Dr. Victor Yang, neurosurgeon at LHSC, explained.

“In Dave’s scenario, he also needed surgery done from the side of the spine as well…In the old days, we will do this surgery in two stages. And sometimes they (were) even spread over different days. And even if we can do it on the same day, we’ll still have to flip the patient between two positions. And that means that the patient will be under anesthetic for a longer time.”