Day In The Life : Daybreak

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I'm breaking one of my rules today. It's an old rule and it's a rule my uncle taught me who was a surgeon and he taught me long ago to not operate on friends and family, which I think is a very good rule of thumb, but as i've gotten older I've realized that there are some things you get really good at and there's nobody better to do it than you, and for me that's the case today.

I learned that from two doctors that I one i trained with Dr. Reg Haid and also from Beth Dupree who is a breast surgeon out in Arizona.

What she taught me was..., "Hey if you're the best guy to do it even though it's a family member or a friend, you might want to consider doing the surgery". Now the reason I've always had a little pause for that and why my uncle taught me that lesson is because you can lose your objectivity when you're caring for somebody and if you love them and you have a special relationship with them and something starts going wrong, or there's a problem, you could have your judgment blunted in some respects so it's important to keep that in perspective and I am keeping that in perspective, but I would have to say that as I've gotten more experienced..., as I've gotten more comfortable in my skin if it's something that I truly know there's nobody that can do this better than I can I think it's the right thing to do to offer the surgery.

I'm not ready to do surgery on my family but today I have a friend who said "Hey, listen I have complete confidence in you and I want you to do this to do the surgery", and I said, you know what it'll be my honor to do your surgery. So as I mature and get more and more experienced i'm realizing that sometimes old rules don't apply later on in your life.

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So that's the first thing on my mind..., do a great operation on one of my friends. Then things are kind of light because we've got this Covid thing going on so, we're only doing surgeries that are urgent. My friend's got a foot drop so it needs to get done. That means his foot is actually going paralyzed because of the pressure on the nerves so this is definitely an urgent case and falls under the auspices of "have to do".

Purely elective surgery - right now we're postponing for the next few weeks until the surge dies down,  so I've got a lumbar procedure which will take me about two / two and a half hours. Something like that, and then it's possible I may have a second surgery. I have another person who came in after a fall and they have a subdural hematoma which is causing some pressure on their brain. I'm going to have to examine them and really see how significant their symptoms are, because it's one of those gray zones where it may need surgery or we might be able to observe it and let mother nature take its course and resolve it on its own.

So that's the next thing I've got to handle and then i've got a meeting with Aaron Bethea who is our Executive Director of Trenton Youth Wrestling. I've got to talk to him about how we're gonna get our wrestling practices going again now that school's gone virtual. It's a big problem because we really need to have hands-on wrestling practices for these kids but it's not safe right now so we've gone to virtual and then I'm going to meet with another new acquaintance about some research opportunities in concussion.

So that'll be my afternoon and then finally the pm still resistance is wrestling practice tonight and I've been working on this talk I'm going to give the kids, so I'm still jiggering it around in my mind what I'm actually going to say. You know I practice these things a lot. I think about them because I really think when I'm talking to kids in wrestling practice it's kind of like doing brain surgery. I'm literally implanting thoughts and words and considerations in their brain.

They're like sponges... they eat this stuff up and so I want to be as careful as I possibly can be, to insert thoughts that are going to serve them..., that are going to work for them and give them the tools to succeed in what they want to succeed in. I take these talks very seriously. I think about them a lot. I bounce them off a lot of people.

I practice them, and I'm always trying to make them better. Tonight's talk is going to be about choices and whether we're going to choose to go the distance or take a shortcut and so I'm mulling it around..., thinking about what I want to say..., how I want to say it..., trying to think of the old stoic reverse clauses, Sometimes the kids pay more attention and you can really really have a lot of impact..., sometimes they're a little distracted or it's not the right night to do it, and you've got to keep it a little lighter this is a talk that's a little bit heavier. It's a little meatier and I'm hoping that we have the right chemistry to really deliver the kind of talk I want to deliver and so that's what I'm thinking about right now. How to create that environment. How to start practice off in the right way. How to get the kids thinking about it. I planted the seed uh the other night. I told them I was going to give them a talk..., kind of prepared them. I told them we're going to spend some time thinking about things and so I've primed it, and then you've kind of got to go with the flow. You know sometimes you get curveballs. Sometimes there are some kids who are a little more active and they're just not as attentive and you've got to keep your talk lighter. 

If I had the group that i had on Tuesday, we're going to have the right environment to really land a good talk, so I'm very excited about that.

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