I am an acute care surgical hospitalist, which means I'm a hospital-based surgeon who cares for patients who enter the hospital through the emergency room or who don't have a surgeon assigned to their case.
I honed my trauma skills in the U.S. Army as a surgeon at Fort Polk, La.; Fort Riley, Kan.; and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, caring for soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every day I would see injuries I'd never seen before: blast wounds, penetrating wounds and burns, sometimes all on one patient. And we often received six or seven serious injuries at a time. I cared for many young men with life-altering injuries.
Ernest Moore, M.D., a surgeon who wrote the comprehensive text on trauma care, was at Landstuhl while I was there. He would come in to my surgeries because he too was seeing things he'd never seen before - not in 35 years as a surgeon. Unfortunately, that's war.
Now, I can transfer the medical techniques I learned in war to benefit the civilian population. For example, I started a rapid transfusion protocol at NorthBay Medical Center that has already helped patients in our trauma center.
I credit the mentoring I received when I was young with steering me into medicine. My neighbor was a gastroenterologist, and my mom and sister are nurses. In college I shadowed surgeons to learn more about the profession.
When not at work, my wife and I are busy with our baby daughter. I enjoy golf and travel.
