The nurse applied a series of numbing drops to my eyeball, each stronger than the previous. The doctor clamped my lids back with a metal tool. I felt a bracket hold my eye down and someone in the operating room gave the order, "Suction."

A whirring sound commenced and my eyeball felt like it was being sucked up and out of my skull, elongated like a green grape between a Roman emperor's fingers, ready to burst. The bright blue-white light grew closer. As the pressure killed circulation in the eye things went black and I felt an arcing slice in the surface of my cornea—I did not move my jaw or tongue or mouth, but deep in my throat I uncontrollably whimpered, "THAT HURT!" and hoped no one heard me. I hoped the other eye would not feel the same. It did not, as the drops had actually taken full effect by the time it was sliced open with a beam of light. The rest was, as they said in the brochure, physically painless.

A few days earlier on Linda Del Mar beach, a wave knocked me off my longboard. Under the turbulence, both contact lenses were flushed out of my eyes. It was impossible for me to catch any more waves with the remainder of my eyesight. Although I'd entertained the idea for years on and off, it was right there that I decided to get LASIK done as soon as I could. A friend told me he'd had good success at LasikPlus. Coincidentally, my vision plan gave a hefty discount there, so I figured I would try them out. It was them or the LASIK doctor from Family Guy:

I went for a free consultation. Their office was like any other doctor's office, with one exception. In the middle—behind a giant glass window that everyone in the waiting room could see—was an operating chair situated in between giant boxy machines. They had overhanging beaks positioned as if ready to feast on whoever was strapped into the seat.

The optometrist concluded I was a good candidate for the surgery, based on having light to middle nearsightedness, slight astigmatism and otherwise healthy eyes. She showed me a brochure with all the options I could get: The $900 base package uses a scalpel to cut open the cornea and then a broad UV laser whose every zap removes tissue 1/500th of a human hair in thickness. I opted for the $2000 package, which opened the cornea with a laser instead of a scalpel and tracked a custom map of my eye's irregularities, treating it sector by sector. This wavefront guided analysis is the same tech NASA used to detect and counter irregularities in high-powered telescopes. This would reduce halos around bright lights and "dramatically improve vision." According to a study I do not know enough about to believe, it was more likely to better than 20/20 vision with such a package than without. The Navy recommends this version of LASIK for its aviators. And if it's good enough for Top Gun, it was good enough for me, regardless of cost. (These quotes are per eye.)

I was surprised to discover when I went in later that others were getting the basic surgery. I winced as one lady's eye was cut by a scalpel in a device akin to a carpenter's plane. Another lady—whose husband was getting it later depending on how hers went—complained about night vision problems but didn't opt for the costlier halo-reducing procedure. I found this astounding considering the banners on LasikPlus's site offering 0% financing.

Someone asked the nurse what the difference was between the cheap and the expensive LASIK and she said something that might not have been exactly endorsed by the company: The expensive one was like high-definition TV and the cheaper one was like standard-definition, but they both get the job done. I thought to myself, "Like hell standard definition gets the job done!" Yet everyone in the room nodded as if they were still using VHS at home.

On the Saturday before the lasering, I had gone surfing with my contacts but was told to wear glasses for the next three days to ready my eyes for the operation. Hard lenses need to be left out for 4-6 weeks before surgery since they greatly affect the shape of the eyeball.

Wearing my glasses again, I appreciated the nice titanium frames and ultrathin glass. I realized there was a lot to be said for how glasses made me feel. In 7th grade, I'd noticed difficulty making out the blackboard, but avoided getting them and got through math class by squinting. The teacher reported me to the nurse, and I got stuck with some hideous gold colored ones with horn rimmed earpieces. I felt self conscious in them, almost diminished.

That feeling went away as I grew up and earned some nerd pride, but I have always allowed myself to say geekier things and do more socially awkward things when wearing them. I could futz with my phone instead of carrying on in a group conversation, push my glasses up my nose and laugh slightly louder than usual at slightly stupider things, and expect people to chalk it up to nerdiness. I think I might miss this, for all the advantages of having laser-enhanced vision.

On the day of the operation, the doctor spoke to the patients in the waiting room. The entire procedure would take about 15 seconds per eye. There was nothing we could possibly do to cause the surgery to fail, but please do not shake our legs. (?!?) Lisa asked me at least 5 times if I was scared. It made me wonder if I looked scared, because I didn't think I was scared and if I looked scared that means I was so scared I didn't even realize it. Which all freaked me out. A lot.

Once my corneas were cut open and I experienced that initial pain, I was definitely frightened, and escaped to a corner of my mind where I would not think too much about all the things they were doing to my eyes and what my life would be like if I happened to be the "less than 1%" of patients with vision-reducing complications.

I was already in this mental cone of silence when the doctor lifted up the covers of my eyeball flaps using what looked like metal chopsticks, mixing around a stir fry while I watched, first-person perspective, from within the wok. I was shifted under the largest machine in the room, its eye a flashing red/orange light. It reminded me of a Discovery Channel feature on exploding stars. There was a sound, a clicking like that from a Tesla coil, and the smell of ozone, which went on for 15 seconds as the nurse counted down. My eyes were clamped, and I felt I was being burned alive (even though LASIK's UV laser does no thermal damage to tissue). I was told not to attempt to move or blink, which of course, makes you move and blink. The muscles in my eye fought the devices holding me steady, and before I could calm myself down, the laser had already stopped.

The doctor finished my second eye, and had me sit up. There was fog everywhere and contrast was abysmal, but my vision had improved by measures of sharpness. I slept in the car ride home as Lisa drove, and as the painkillers wore off. The hard part began: I was to avoid all optical stimulation and sleep the rest of the day. At one point, I could handle it no longer and I checked my email. All of it.

I was told that the next morning I would have a miraculous, life-changing experience as I woke up without any need for glasses or contacts. Actually, it was not so miraculous. My healing eyes could see somewhat sharply but with a lot of haze. It was similar to sleeping with my contacts in. I took off the racquetball-style eye shield I was to sleep with for a week, and began the steroid and antibiotic eye-drop treatment, which I'd also keep up for a week. I got dressed and went for my check up appointment. And that was when the miracle happened.

I got in front of that damn eye chart and, even through the haze, smoked the exam's 20/20 line. Had my eyes been clearer, I would have read the letters on the 20/15 line, too. Not bad for $4K, a laser in my eyes for less than a minute and a day's worth of healing.

After I get used to the sharpness, I am sure I will be worried about being one of the few percentage of people who walk away from LASIK dissatisfied. (Wikipedia cites four studies that indicate post-op satisfaction anywhere from 92% to 98%, but that's still a lot of people pissed off.) Even if things go perfectly, they say it will take 3-6 months to heal completely, during which my vision will be irregular. Eyeballs might be dryer at times than I'd want them to be. The biggest problems I have now are the night time halos, which supposedly will improve over time, especially with the wavefront guided method my eyes were carved up with and the terrible, terrible bloodshot I have from the suction device. They say this may take a few weeks to clear up, and while I'm waiting, I have been wearing sunglasses at night and apologizing for them. Annoying.

None of this bothers me much, save the fact that newer, better, safer technology will come around sooner or later, and my eyes may end up as out-of-date as back-to-school iPods. There is talk of using the laser to cut the flap, which is of lower disruption to the corneal tissue, to complete the entire operation, soon. And I do not know if my eyes will be forward-compatible, having already been sliced. Still, for now I remain top-of-the-line, and I would gladly endure 10 times the (mostly imaginary) pain of LASIK to gain the quality of eyesight found in elite Major League Baseball pitchers.

[Thanks to Lisa for feeding me, driving me home and taking that video.]

Spinal cord simulators are nothing new, but the size of the Eon Mini combined with the fact that it is easily recharged make it a viable solution for people with severe back problems or other chronic conditions. Unfortunately, it may be awhile before you can have one implanted for your bad back, gimpy knee and pesky RSI. [LiveScience]

The FDA's just okayed it for marketing in the US, so it may be coming to an OR near you soon. [Peak Surgical via Medgadget]

Research conducted with nine patients fitted with the implant revealed that the average caloric intake went down by about 500 calories a day and the average weight loss over nine months was equivalent to 30% of the excess body weight. Those numbers pale in comparison to what gastric bypass can deliver, but the risk involved with the procedure is drastically reduced—so much so that it may be appropriate for individuals who do not fit into the "morbidly obese" category. Testing is expected to continue in the US and Australia with 300 more patients in the coming months. [Technology Review via DVICE]

Once the tools are safely inserted into the patient's gut, a tiny incision is made in the stomach wall to get at the appendix. The inflamed appendix is cut away, grabbed by one of the mini-tools, and bagged in a special mesh pouch. The organ is then pulled back into the stomach and out of the mouth.

The benefits of this new procedure go beyond aesthetic, as pioneering patient and ex-Marine Jeff Scholtz confirmed in a post-op interview. "They told me to take it easy but I felt great. I was eating pizza and doing situps three days later," Scholtz said.

That's right, no week-long downtime or months of low-intensity activity, and no more huge scars from huge incisions. No hernias or infection either, said Santiago Horgan, of the University of San Diego Medical Center. Doctors say this is the way forward for other procedures, and I'm inclined to agree, so long as we keep the colonoscopy relegated to the rear where it belongs. [Daily Mail]

Getting children to the operating room is extremely scary for them (and us too), so they usually have to be sedated to calm them down. Dr. Low observed that by watching some videos on the iPhone, his kids got completely disconnected from the outside world. He thought that this effect could help children in the hospital get distracted—especially when they leave the room where they wait with their parents—so he gave it a try.

It worked. And for six months, he has used this method with 450 children, reducing the use of sedatives by 85%. The benefit not only makes the children a little bit less nervous: without sedatives, kids wake up smoother and are less drowsy after the operation, so they can get back home more quickly.

Of course, this can be done with any video playing device, but Dr. Low seems to believe that the iPhone is perfect for the job, arguing that it doesn't interfere with the equipment and can be easily sanitized. We are sure that the same can be said about other personal media players, but whatever helps kids is fine with us. [King5]

Team leader Professor Toshiki Yoshimine says that using electrode sheets directly installed over the brain's surface increases the sensibility in comparison to skin electrodes. This is a risky procedure in and of itself, so the team has been working with volunteers that had electrodes installed for other medical applications, like epilepsy monitoring.

The operation doesn't require penetration into the brain itself: they put the electrode sheet in the central sulcus, also called the Rolandic fissure after Luigi Rolando, the Italian professor who devoted his life to the study of brain anatomy. This fold separates the brain's parietal lobe from the frontal lobe, but more importantly in this case, the primary motor cortex from the primary somatosensory cortex—the key area for voluntary muscle operation in the body.

The Osaka University team's next step is to actually connect these patients to actual robotic limbs, so they can control them using the software modelled after the data collected from their previous experiments. [Asahi via Pink Tentacle]

Its snake/tentacle body is designed to perform cardiac surgery without damaging other tissue on the way in to its destination. Currently their smallest prototype is 12 inches long and just 0.47 across, with 102 degrees of freedom and is joystick-steered by a surgeon. Successful cardiovascular operations have been carried out using CardioArm on cadavers and pigs, and more extensive human trials are upcoming.

It's a technology suited to many different surgeries, but not until it's a tad smaller: ultimately the team plan to miniaturize it to the point that it can get in via a vein. That's sending the biggest shivers down my spine, I can tell you. [TechnologyReview via MedGadget]

For now, the new software tracks the surgeons' eye movements and builds a 3D map of the tissue they're eyeballin'. That image is stabilized and easy for the doc to work with, even though the robot's instruments are in fact moving along with whatever organ they're toying around inside.

The other cyber-surgeon craziness they're cooking up is a virtual overlay that makes tissue see-through: It models what's underneath it, like a tumor, and gives the doctor high-res Ghost in the Shell vision. So, how long before you swallow nanobot pills that'll patch up your heart automatically and then you poop 'em out? [The Guardian]

The boffins are confident the robot will be able to aid in general laparoscopic surgery, but the researchers are intending its use to be specially designed for heart bypass operations. The benefits of such procedures against traditional surgery are numerous; patients have a reduced recovery time and incisions are rarely sizable. Given the miniscule scale in which the i-Snake needs to function, it will be quite a feat to have a working model that packs in all the desired features, but if anyone can do it, a team of leading researchers with $4.2 million are probably the best chaps for the challenge. [BBC News]

A year before, Dubrovik, a 37-year-old, had "Hot Rod" tattooed on his peen for a $1,000 bet (let me guess, in large gothic letters, with flames coming out of the base, right?). "It was the most horrible thing I went through in my life," said Sean of his gallbladder operation genital inking, which just raises the question, why did you do it, dumbass?

Anyway, enough of the heinous penis backstory, let's get back to the clinic. A scandalized member of the surgical team reported Hansen's actions to the clinic, but not before tipping off the local newspaper. The surgeon, who had apparently shown his patient's artwork to his fellow surgeons, called Dubrovik to apologize, assuring him that he had deleted the photo.

"I feel violated, betrayed and disgusted" says Dubrovik, who is considering legal action, of the surgeon's actions, which is probably similar to how all those folks who saw the photo of his tattoo feel. Meanwhile, the doctor, who is on administrative leave pending an investigation, could lose his job. [BBC Online]

"Sure the proceedure was expensive, but when I think of all the time I save by being able to use modern handhelds so much faster, I really think the surgery will pay for itself in ten to fifteen years...that's priceless." Too bad it makes the big man's hands look "effeminate." I'm not sure I believe this story, but if it's real, I want photos of the tranny hands. UPDATE: Phil over at Apple 2.0 writes that this is a satire piece. Fine, I figured, but honestly, if they wanted to write satire, and not an internet myth, they probably should have gone over the top with the quotes. What they don't get is that with some Apple fans going far enough to get tattoos, this wasn't such an unbelievable jump. [NorthDenverNews]

So what do you think? Would you rather have a doc slicing and dicing from the outside in, or would you be OK having a tiny robot swimming around your insides doing all the work instead? I can't really imagine the feeling of having a robot inside me, but I guess in the long run it would be better to have the most minimally invasive surgery possible. –Adam Frucci

Chugoku Shimbun (in Japanese) [via Pink Tentacle]

We're not sure how well it works, but if we can get out of doing any form of exercise at all, then it's a winner in our books.

They've even got a demo video on the website narrated by a robot showing the plastic surgeon circling "problem areas" on the fatty patient. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Ultra Shape via Red Ferret via Uber Gizmo]

Next time you go to get your gall bladder removed, your surgeon may have a tiny helper. No, it's not a bile-covered gnome. It's a robot!

Instead of the older laparoscopic cameras that are used for this and other smaller surgeries, new radio-controlled mini-robots are now being tested on animals (that pig didn't need his prostate, anyhow). One robot has a camera, while another comes with a needle that can extract tissue for biopsies. And yet another can move around the abdominal cavity, with a spiral pattern on its wheels to easily maneuver over organ surfaces. Yum yum. These robots would pass right through small incisions on the body and other robots are being developed to help in emergency surgery as well.

Dextrous mini-robots to aid ops [BBC]