[derekmhewitt]

Personally, my main take away from this article was that in 2015 50% of the patients that had a kidney removed (which would roughly be the other 24k patients the study didn't comment on) had their kidneys removed via an old school open incision procedure. Why is that still happening at all? Laparoscopic procedures are significantly safer for the patient, cheaper and faster than old school methods, and they have a quicker recovery time, but just two years ago literally half of the kidney removals performed in these 416 hospitals were using a completely outdated method.

[mrbill]

I had this exact surgery (robot-assisted laproscopic complete nephrectomy) back on September 22nd.

In my case, once the doc got in there, the tumor+kidney was too big and they had to cut a normal open incision to get it out.

So, I ended up with three tiny laproscopic scars and one big 10" scar.