Like thousands of women in Northern Ireland, Colleen Crothers waited decades for medical help to treat chronic endometriosis – and, now thanks to an all-island first, she’s hoping her long road will be a thing of the past.<\/p>\n
“Robotic surgery came too late for me,” she said. “I hope other women won’t have to wait as long.”<\/p>\n
She is talking about a new breakthrough for female patients in Northern Ireland – the Da Vinci gynae robot at Belfast City Hospital.<\/p>\n
Operated by humans, the robot’s wrists can twist and turn in tight pelvic spaces and it is said to be more precise at complex surgery than a human hand because it is steadier.<\/p>\n
Belfast’s Da Vinci robot is the first of its kind on the island of Ireland and one of only a few across the UK.<\/p>\n
It has the potential to massively reduce complex gynaecological surgical waiting lists in Northern Ireland, which affect thousands of women’s physical and mental health and their ability to have children.<\/p>\n
With an average wait of about seven years for complex surgery, which involves several specialities, delayed treatment means some women require a hysterectomy, like Colleen at 41.<\/p>\n
She has lived with chronic endometriosis all of her adult life, having first begun to experience chronic period pain aged 14.<\/p>\n
But it took another 22 years before she was referred to gynaecology and a scan confirmed she had both adenomyosis and endometriosis.<\/p>\n
“I missed out so much of family life due to daily pain – pain that went on for years,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I can’t have children – I have had to have a hysterectomy and I’m in early menopause.<\/p>\n
“To be told you can’t have children is hard to swallow,” she said.<\/p>\n
An urgent case, Colleen missed out on a Da Vinci operation by just weeks earlier this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like thousands of women in Northern Ireland, Colleen Crothers waited decades for medical help to treat chronic endometriosis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-821636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}