Exclusive | Mom gets groundbreaking mastectomy from a $2M robot named Carol and went to the beach with a tiny scar weeks later

A California mom of two is back to her normal life after a robot helped removed her breast cancer in a historic surgery.After noticing a bump during a self exam, Vicky Pan, 46, was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive form that grows fast.She found the cancer had already spread to nearby lymph nodes.She had “this deep seated fear,” she told The Post.

“My whole family was very scared, including my kids, and devastated with the news.”She underwent a robotic single-port mastectomy, the first of its kind in the US outside clinical trials, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland.“I was both nervous and excited at the same time.Nervous since it was a big surgery, my first in my life.

Yet I was also excited to get the tumor out of my body.”With the help of the $2 million robot, the incision point is so small and surgery precise, it leaves the nipple and skin intact.This minimizes changes to appearance and recovery times.In clinical trials, only a few centers offered the procedure, and there were strict limits on who could qualify to undergo the surgery — and strict limits on who could perform it, too.

Now, things are changing as more hospitals can get ahold of the technology and more surgeons trained on how to use it.The only part without the robot is the first, small incision — the size of a paper clip, Dr.Rita Kwan-Feinberg, who performed the surgery, told The Post.

All the necessary tools enter here, usually away from the breast, at the side of the chest.Then, the doctor uses the robot to see beyond the limits of human perception.They call it “3D vision.”“I can literally see small little vessels pulsating,” Kwan-Feinberg said.

“I can see the blood flowing through those vessels because the magnification is so high and the detail is so great.”That makes a big difference in making precise cuts, which is the name of the game in a mastectomy.They key is to remove cancerous tissue between the skin and breast tis...