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Well, first of all, for most women, the most important thing is that they have annual GYN
care. Lots of cancers are picked up early just as a result of having an annual exam.
Apart from that, there are some warning signs for GYN cancers. For uterine cancers, cervical
cancers, vaginal cancers, abnormal uterine bleeding or abnormal vaginal bleeding, which
typically will bring a patient in to see either their primary care doctor or their gynecologist.
For ovarian cancer, you can have abdominal discomfort, bloating, getting full easily,
which is called early satiety, tumor in the abdomen. Shortness of breath if you have fluid
collections or pelvic pain or abdominal pain. So, abnormal bleeding, bleeding after menopause,
bleeding after relations, abdominal or pelvic discomfort would be the usual symptoms of
an early cancer or an advanced cancer. You know, Covenant is fairly unique in terms of
GYN cancer treatment in that there is a board certified GYN/oncologist at Covenant, which
not all hospitals have. There are only 15 or 17 GYN/oncologists in the state of Michigan.
To provide, expert GYN cancer care, you also will need other specialists, namely pathologists
that are used to interpreting pathology material. Radiologists, interventional radiologists
and full support of other disciplines and Covenant has the full support of other disciplines
to help take care of those types of patients. With the da Vinci robotic system, we're able
to offer robotic and laparoscopic surgery to women with uterine cancer, cervical cancer,
some women with early cancers of the ovary or fallopian tube. And, this is a system for
surgery with minimally invasive surgery that not all hospitals have or have expertise with.
Currently, we do approximately 65 percent of our cancer surgeries using the robotic
system, which has the benefit of early discharge and quick recovery for patients. With da Vinci,
one of the nice things has been it's an evolution. The use of laparoscopy to treat GYN cancers
has evolved since the early 1990s when the first reports were issued are using laparoscopy
to treat women with uterine cancer and cervical cancer. There were six national studies done
through the gynecologic oncology group, the national study group for women's cancers.
Saginaw was one of the sites that was able to enter patients on those studies and we
participated in all the studies. There have been a couple very large studies using laparoscopy
to treat GYN cancers and we've been involved in all those studies. With the robotic system,
it extends the availability of laparoscopy to a lot of individuals who would have not
been good candidates for laparoscopic surgery. We've had the da Vinci system since February
of 2009 and now have done over 400 surgeries using robotics.