Before robotic surgery, hip was ‘painful with every step,’ man says

By Kristen Aguirre

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    ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (WLOS) — A new high-tech surgery at Mission Hospital is helping patients get back to doing what they love.

The surgery involves a robot, and one patent said it gave him back his life.

“It’s painful with every step,” Gurumeher Khalsa said of his arthritic hip.

He lived in pain for 15 years before January 2022, when he underwent hip surgery at Mission Hospital

“Modern medicine is a miracle. You don’t have to live with pain,” Khalsa said.

But before you picture R2-D2 working on Khalsa’s hip, it wasn’t like that.

“I know exactly to the degree and millimeter of where I’m going to put the components,” Khalsa’s orthopedic surgeon Dr. Philip Fontenot said. “While it is robotic surgery, I’m still in complete control, and it’s really robotics assistance surgery.”

Mission bought the robot after Fontenot pushed for it.

“The surgery can be shorter, and there’s not as much trialing, using different components to see what fits,” Fontenot said.

Khalsa, one of the first patients to undergo the robotic surgery in Western North Carolina, said it’s a perfect fit.

“You take our ability to walk for granted, but when every step is painful, life is not fun,” he said.

For fun, Khalsa climbed a mountain in Mexico just six weeks post-surgery.

“I was just kicking around this soccer ball, and I’m going, ‘I haven’t been able to do this in a decade.’”

Fontenot said Khalsa is unique.

“Gurumeher is not very typical. He’s a very special patient, and I was very surprised and pleased he was able to do that,” Fontenot said.

Khalsa is just happy to have his life back.

“When someone has the ability to give you your life back, that’s great,” he said.

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