Chasing Mastery: Mind & Hands

it takes decades right and i'll tell you how pedestrians we spine surgeons are neanderthals when i have a new resident coming in and i'm like oh that that you know you've done better I'll be like listen here's what you're gonna do you're gonna go to Home Depot you're gonna get a box of a thousand nails and a two by four and a hammer and you're gonna hammer a thousand nails into the wood and then you can come back to my OR okay now I'm sure that's not how you train or at least at the early stages microvascular surgery or microsurgery tell us about some practical steps what can people do do they have to go to the lab

Well, there's no better simulator than the lab.

You can watch videos, which is fun.

You can throw stitches in your armchair, which is something I used to do when I was a surgical intern.

But there's nothing like going to the lab and also finding ways in your practice to... to bring the craft to life like just the other day i was taken out of cavernous malformation and um inadvertently had a laceration of an artery so you know there are these things that come up and when you're when you're ready to deploy your your skills there are always things that you can bring in and it helps helps you get better and um like tell me about like is there like a chicken wing model Oh, there's every model.

Tell us some models.

Well, first of all, there's the silastic tubes.

There's chicken wings.

What are you sewing in the wing? So in the wing, if you go along the bone of the wing, it would be the equivalent of the humerus.

The artery runs right along there.

You fish it out of there.

You can kind of loop it on itself to an end to side.

You can loop it on itself to a side to side.

You can cut it and sew it back together for an end to end.

So you just do all the permutations.

I've

eaten chicken wings and those vessels are about like a millimeter or two, maybe a couple of millimeters in diameter, right? It's like

dental floss.

Okay, so

it's similar to like a small vessel in the brain.

Exactly, yeah.

But okay, so there's chicken wings, there's placentas.

Placenta? So one of the great things in our hospital, we have tons of placentas.

Human placenta.

Human placenta from the maternity ward.