I remember being in medical school thinking that I wanted to be a surgeon. The idea of it appealed to me very much. I certainly had the personality of a surgeon. But there was something about which I felt very insecure.
Published on 6 years, 11 months ago
You see, growing up, my dad was about as white collar as they get. I didn’t learn anything about cars and never put up any shelves. The only reason to think I was any good with my hands at all was the fact that I excelled in hand-eye-coordination sports like ice hockey and table tennis (aka ping-pong).
So as much as I loved the idea of being a surgeon, I had this big fear that I would be horrible at it. And, in the beginning, I kind of was!
In medical school, all of the guys I liked were orthopedic surgeons. They were all into sports like me. The problem was that they were all carpenters at heart and I was NOT. I remember an orthopedic surgery resident handing me a saw to amputate a guy’s leg at the VA. Having that tool in my hands wasn’t pretty. Fortunately, the leg was supposed to come off anyway.
Eventually, I realized that I was better at soft tissue surgery (no bones). I felt that I was better with fine movements than using power tools. That’s one of the reasons I decided to operate on brains.
In fact, the first time I ever used a drill, it was in medical school drilling through someone’s skull on my neurosurgery rotation. I got pretty good with that drill after a while. It was the only power tool I liked.
I remember getting confident enough practicing on people’s skulls that I bought a drill at the hardware store to put up some shelves in my apartment for the first time.
Okay…so all of this sounds a little messed up I know. But it’s true. The good news for me was that there was a little bit of a learning curve getting my hands wet but pretty soon, I became a pretty darn good surgeon.
In hindsight, the fear and anxiety of not being good at surgery were silly. As it turned out, becoming a good surgeon was really no different than becoming good at anything else in life—it took practice.
In the case of most surgical procedures, you sort of do the same maneuvers in every case. After my neurosurgery stint (which I left because of the hours), I spent some time doing cosmetic surgery. I watched the masters do hundreds of operations.
There was one guy I watched that was particularly interesting to me because his results were so good and so consistent. What I noticed when I watched him carefully was that he did everything the same every single time. In fact, I counted about 6 discreet maneuvers that he did for every patient and wrote them down.
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