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Da Vinci first met Alvin Gesick in April.
The two shook hands, in a manner of speaking, under a big, white tent erected for groundbreaking ceremonies at Medical Center of the Rockies, the regional hospital that Poudre Valley Health System is building in Loveland.
Gesick, a 65-year-old retired Colorado State University employee, was among the curious who lined up to see da Vinci, the $1.2 million surgical robot that gave the event's guests hands-on opportunities to view its capabilities.
Gesick could hardly have known that he and da Vinci would reunite nine months later in a Poudre Valley Hospital operating room.
In October, a prostate- specific antigen test, or PSA, hinted that Gesick had prostate cancer. A biopsy the next month confirmed the diagnosis.
Working under the direction of Fort Collins urologist Dr. Stephen Brutscher, da Vinci on Jan. 20 removed Gesick's cancerous prostate in a five-hour procedure, a radical prostatectomy - the first such surgery in the hospital's history and the first robotic surgery in Brutscher's career.
What made that operation so radically different from any other done at PVH, other than the robotic arms that performed almost every part of it, was what happened to Gesick during and after:
* The operating room staff had three units of blood on hand to replace blood lost, standard for prostatectomies. They used none. Zero.
* Gesick was on his feet within hours, and home within a day - and four or five days ahead of the schedule most prostate cancer surgery patients face.
* He used no post-operative pain medication - not because he was stoic and brave, but because he had no pain.
In an industry where success is measured in "outcomes," Gesick's could not have been better.
"The nurses kept saying 'We can't believe this. People just don't do this,"' Gesick said. "They wanted to...