Here’s how Yuba City students helped a local hospital with its new surgical technology

Steady Eddie is the latest addition to the team at Sutter Surgical Hospital North Valley.

No, not Eddie Murray, the former Hall of Fame slugger dubbed so for his unwavering accomplishments. This is a new medical tool nicknamed by a group of local school kids.

The robotics class from Riverbend Elementary School in Yuba City won a competition to name the new surgical robot, which the group of seventh- and eighth-graders paid a visit to Thursday. Surgeons demonstrated the functionality behind the newly christened piece of tech, which caught the attention of seventh-grader Rocky Mann.

“I’ve learned quite a lot just around surgery and how sophisticated it really is,” he said. “I already knew it was really difficult, but now that I’ve seen some of the tactics they use firsthand, I see how hard of a job it is to do. Especially with the robot having to be coded. The manual way is a lot harder with how precise you have to be.”

The Mako Robotic-Arm technology, as it is more formally known, assists doctors in hip and knee joint replacement surgeries, with a personalized precision that can lead to less pain and shorter recovery periods, which may lessen the need for prescriptions or painkillers.

Mann said the class tossed around a lot of humorous names for the innovation before settling on a name they felt was reflective of a surgeon’s steady hands.

“And it rhymes, so that’s bonus points,” Rocky added.

“This was a great opportunity for us having this new technology here,” said Dennis Sindelar, the hospital’s chief administrative officer. “We wanted to engage the community as much as we could, so we opened it up to all the schools in the Yuba-Sutter area. We actually had 30 schools participate and offer names or suggestions for names. Our hospital voted and we selected a name we’re excited about.”

Doctors man the robotic arm to take CT scans, generate 3-D models to anatomical specifics and remove arthritic cartilage and bone.

“With how the field is evolving so rapidly to where, maybe a year ago you needed to do all this manual work, and now it’s made much simpler with robots like Steady Eddie over here,” Rocky said. “It’s really amazing how humanity has evolved over the years to create such machines,20 years ago this would have been considered impossible or fictitious, but now this is reality.”

This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 4:00 AM.