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The Hands of a Surgeon

My partner, Lee Kirksey, Vice-Chair of Vascular Surgery, just got a paper on-line (link) about the curiously increasing volume of open surgical repairs we were experiencing from 2010-2014 at the Cleveland campus of the Cleveland Clinic. When I joined in 2012, my impressions at that time were mostly the paucity of straightforward EVAR cases that I had seen in private practice, and the high prevalence of stent graft explantation, infected aortic grafts, and open aortic aneurysm repairs (OAR) for juxtarenal and thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms for nominally high risk patients. My TAAA muscles had atrophied during my years out of fellowship and I eagerly took the opportunity to recruit the help of my partners and scrub in on these cases with Pat O’Hara, Jean Kang, Dan Clair, Ezequiel Parodi, and Lee Kirksey. It is without any shame that I sought out not just extra expert hands, but interrogated these experts for different ideas and approaches, and absorbed feedback. At the time, I was ten years removed from graduation, a full-fledged vascular surgeon who thought he could do any operation put before him. I cannot imagine the thoughts churning through the head of a recent graduate faced with the choice of taking on an open aortic operation with only 5 cases under their belt, referring the case on to the regional tertiary center, or trying to McGyver an endovascular solution. I contributed probably about 35-50 cases to this paper, but the outcomes were a collective effort. Even today, I will run cases by Sean Lyden, Christopher Smolock, or Lee, if only for the company and gossip.

“We explain this distribution of cases as a function of several factors: a unique, broad regional quaternary referral practice whereby patients with complex aneurysmal disease are referred to our institution; an institutional practice evolution resulting from a critical analysis and understanding of EVAR failure modes that lead to explantation, thus generating a different perspective in the EVAR vs open decision-making process; a parallel high-risk IDE fenestrated graft study; a historical willingness to accept all physician and self-directed patient referrals (ie, a willingness to manage more complex cases); and a published expertise in the area of EVAR device explantation with an annually growing volume of commercial device removals” -from El-Arousy et al.

Reading through that paper, I have come to the conclusion that the increasing open aortic volumes at the Cleveland campus has as much to do with the ongoing retirement of experienced surgeons regionally as it does with the ability to attract these cases. Loss of these surgeons has a cascade effect like losing a species in an ecosystem. The operating rooms forget where the OMNI retractor is because nobody asks for it anymore. The ICU’s are no longer familiar with the ebb and flow of the postoperative open aortic operation. The floors lose institutional memory of the care of these vascular patients as the stent grafts and interventions go home within 48 hours, sometimes the same day.

If you were a vascular surgeon born before 1970, your approach to the scenario of the ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm may differ substantially from that of surgeons born after the Carter administration. Most of my cohort, Gen-X and older, feel comfortable applying some betadine, opening the belly and placing a clamp. Those younger than us have told me they feel more comfortable putting up a large balloon and deploying a stent graft. In this generation, it is normal to call a general surgeon to decompress the abdominal compartment syndrome and manage the abdominal vacuum dressing. For our generation, the giant industrial robot arms and 80 inch monitors creates a barrier to the problem at hand, and gathering all the extra staff after hours and on weekends requires the logistical skills of a wedding planner.

We prefer an operating table, a willing anesthesiologist, a cooler full of O-neg blood, Prolene and a graft, strong suction, and an extra set of hands. The data suggests either method is equivalent in outcome, but I would argue that depending on the circumstance, there is an optimal method for that patient and you have to have the ability to do either open or endovascular or some hybrid combination. Unfortunately, it is clear that open vascular surgery is year over year diminishing, and and it might not be so great when we start rupturing our aneurysms.

The open approach is preferred because we got good at it by doing a lot of these cases. Your hands -it becomes natural to change the course of the disease and the fate of the patient with your hands. One of the things you lose with a wire based approach is the tactile feedback from the organ that you are treating. Yes, there is a subtle feedback from the flexible tip of a Glidewire, but that’s missing the point. The thing that is rarely considered with open surgery is the tactile aspects of operating.

Your fingers are your point of care ultrasound. As an intern, one of my earliest tasks was reaching in through a 2cm incision with my index finger, feeling for what I would describe as a rotten shrimp, and delivering it out by hooking my distal phalanx around its base. Adhesions were rubbed like money between finger and thumb to judge if you could bovie through it. If you felt a sliding sensation, it was mucosa to mucosa and you looked for another spot to cut. Into my fellowship which could be called the triple-redo, no-one else wants to do-, difficult vascular operations fellowship, the pulse or the plaque felt under the finger would guide me to carve away scar tissue from blood vessel, visualizing the feedback from the fingers. In a rupture, with the belly under a dark mire of blood, there is no seeing, only feeling. Your hands reach into the lesser sac or transverse mesocolon and strangle the aorta -your fingers while clamping, feel and avoid the caudate lobe, the NG tube in the esophagus, and split the crura of the diaphragm like a pick pocket. Once the pulse returns as anesthesia refills the tank, you scratch free the aorta with your thumb and forefinger, then slide the jaws of the aortic cross clamp over your fingers and against the spine and clamp. This takes about 60 to 90 seconds (link).

When a patient is bleeding out, this is the way to control the bleeding. In practice, no amount of rehearsing for getting a patient into a endovascular suite, getting airway and access, swinging in the industrial robot arm, and getting everyone into lead aprons, sending up wire, placing a 12F sheath and an aortic occlusion balloon, will be satisfactorily smoothly and efficiently as a STEMI or STROKE alert. The rAAA is for most hospitals, unless you are in Seattle, a once in a while occurence. Many more people can find a scalpel and an aortic clamp than they can find a 32 inch aortic balloon, a stiff exchange length wire, and a 12F sheath.

When a patient presents with a slowly bleeding, contained rupture, there is time to assemble the teams required for an endovascular repair, and for opening and decompressing the abdomen, for anesthesia to get IV’s, central lines, arterial lines, and order crossmatched blood. One has the time to get and review CT scans and choose grafts. One can even do things backwards, debranching after securing the leak (link) with a stent graft. The luxury of time should signal to you that the endovascular option is the preferable route, as all the advantages of minimally invasive repair are possible. Rural hospitals sending patients two hours by ambulance or arranging for a helicopter -this is the great filter through which those likely to survive make it into the endovascular suite. These patients do great with EVAR, because everything moves more or less like a routine elective EVAR.

The setting up the operating room for tackling rAAA is quite simple. Keep everything nearby. Nothing should ever be stored out of sight, retrievable only by arcane codes whispered in the ears of people down in the basement or across the street. Amazon gives itself a day to get that gadget to you, but the rupturing patient does not have the time to have a 28mm stent graft ordered by looking up a Lawson number, finding the materials person in the faraway room to find it, running it over a city block. The stuff has to be next to the OR. Every scenario is unique, and the best planning is assuming no one person knows where everything is but everything is close at hand -major vascular sets, retractors, C-arm, cell saver, stent grafts, open grafts, balloons, cardiopulmonary bypass -every gewgaw is few steps away. The inventory is what you see, because if you can’t grab it, it does not help the hemorrhaging patient.

If you are a vascular surgeon born after 1980, it is likely that you may have trained in a 0-5 residency and all the old people harumphing about the old ways seem biased. Rather than being rational about their awful upbringing, the old people seem to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, turning from victims of a harsh and brutal system inherited from the original, Halsted, a cocaine addict, to willing collaborators now mooning about the good old days of every other day call and 120 hour work weeks.

There might be a growing suspicion about advocating for open surgery when fewer people can perform it. One of the truisms of surgery is if only one surgeon claims to be able to do a rare operation with great results when everyone else abandons it, like venous valve surgery or robot assisted mastectomies, it can mean that surgeon might be uniquely talented or shamelessly selling something. It is a shame that open vascular surgery is devolving into that category of arcana, like the Jedi. I have no doubt that the last open vascular surgeon will be a reclusive, bitter, wild eyed hermit like Luke Skywalker was in episode VIII, if we let it get that far.

Bald eagles were saved from extinction. The methods of species reclamation may be what is needed to save open vascular surgery. Financial metabolism drives behavior, and there must be recognition of the time and dedication required to perform good open vascular surgery in the form of increased RVUs and reimbursement. The surgeons retiring in their mid 60’s with straight backs and steady hands need to be incentivized to stay around and coach the next generation in the ways of the Jedi. Call it the master surgeon designation. Every 0-5 graduate needs to focus on getting 100 leg bypasses, 50 carotid emdarterectomy, and 25 open aortas within the first five years of practice with a master surgeon if they did not get this experience during training. Like dead Jedi, it would help even if they were just virtually present, shimmering on Facetime in their (bath)robes to go over planning and approaches, but being physically present and reimbursed for it would make the most sense.

There is always self service in any human activity. One mildly prominent vascular surgeon that I have come across is famous for saying he did not have a vascular fellowship because he did not want to train his competition. It is easy for the fifty somethings to sit and proffer their open skills and profit from its scarcity but it goes against decency to not pass on this collective body of hard won knowledge and skills. There must be stewardship of this great thing we do, this honorable and treasured endowment.

Of the concrete ways we are trying is creating a network of advanced open surgery capable surgeons regionally organized by Martin Maresch, capitalizing on social media and electronic communications. Here at CCAD we are in the organizing phase of a vascular residency, and I very fortunate to have Houssam Younes join us as he shares my interest in surgical education and open vascular surgery. We are contemplating a non-accredited fellowship. We have general surgery residents coming through our service as well as medical students.

One of my mentors told me, “I can train a monkey to do cardiac surgery,” as he was training me to do cardiac surgery. And he was right. The final comment I have is you have to demystify surgery, take away the Instagram perfection, the romance, and list in practical terms the toolkit of maneuvers that form the component parts of all operations and propagate it. Let us not kid ourselves. The technical skills of surgery can be taught to anyone. The Mayo brothers were performing surgery as teenagers before medical school. The knowledge and experience and judgement -that varies as much as people vary and we have a curriculum for that, but the physical acts of surgery need to be taught starting at the medical school level. Standardized drills and exercises need to be created so that proficiency can be metered.

“The individual per trainee OAR volume did not decrease during this period. In the training program, the use of “component separation” (separation of each
operation into discrete, instructionable steps that facilitates trainee mastery) is integral to instruction of open aortic aneurysm repair techniques and permits the
trainee to master all of the technical exposure and repair skills necessary to address and to manage both straightforward and complex aneurysm anatomy. Component
separation is essential to maximize trainee experience across all levels” –from reference 1

Here is my list of things a trainee must accomplish by the time they graduate from a vascular residency or fellowship.
1. Tying knots with gloves on with 6-0 Prolene inside a pickle jar without lifting or moving a 12 ounce lead fishing weight to which the suture is being tied, fast, one handed, two handed, left and right handed.
2. Holding forceps, needle holders, and clamps
3. Correct operation of the OMNI retractor, Weitlander retractor, Balfour retractor, Thompson retractor
4. Incise skin through dermis through correct depth and length with both #15 and #10 blade
5. Open the abdomen through midline and flank incisions and close these incisions
6. Harvest saphenous vein
7. Vascular anastomosis on a table, inside a pickle jar, inside a short Pringle’s can
8. Dissection of adhesions and scar tissue around blood vessels and organs
9. Dissect and expose the common femoral artery via vertical and oblique incisions and close these incisions
10. Dissect and expose the carotid bifurcation, left and right side, and close these incisions
11. Dissect and expose the tibial vessels in various parts of the leg and foot
12. Dissect out the brachial artery at the elbow
13. Dissect out the axillary artery and vein below the clavicle
14. Dissect out the axillary artery and vein from the axilla
15. Dissect out the subclavian artery, vein, and brachial plexus above the clavicle
16. Dissect out the arm veins
17. Dissect out the iliac artery via a lower quadrant pelvic retroperitoneal exposure
18. Dissect out the abdominal aorta via midline laparotomy
19. Dissect out the abdominal aorta via retroperitoneal approach
20. Dissect out the thoracoabdominal aorta via a thoracoabdominal exposure
21. Dissect out the popliteal artery via suprageniculate, infrageniculate incisions and prone position
22. Dissect out the inferior vena cava
23. Dissect out the iliac veins
24. Harvest deep femoral vein
25. Temporal artery biopsy
26. Endarterectomy of carotid, femoral artery, any artery with patch angioplasty
27. Exposure and control of supraceliac aorta, suprarenal aorta for clamping
28. Exposure and control of thoracic aorta
29. Exposure and control of the great vessels via sternotomy and supraclavicular incisions
30. Exposure and control of the vertebral artery
31. Safe removal of vascularized tumors
32. Amputations of digits, legs and arms up to pelvis and shoulder
33. Exposure and control of radial and ulnar arteries
34. Hand surgical techniques of exposing arteries, tendons, and nerves in forearm and hand
35. Plastic surgical techniques of skin grafting and basic rotational flaps
36. Fasciotomy of arms and legs, hands and feet.
37. Exposure and control of celiac axis
38. Exposure and control of superior mesenteric artery
39. Exposure and control of left renal vein
40. Exposure and control of hepatic veins, portal vein
41. Exposure and control of renal arteries
42. Exposure and control of profunda femoral arteries
43. Safe removal of spleen
44. Transabdominal retroperitoneal exposures of the abdominal aorta and inferior vena cava
45. All of the above in a reoperative field
46. All of the above with limited visualization and by sense of feel only
47. Laparoscopic and thoracoscopic techniques
48. Orthopaedic surgical techniques of myodesis, bone grafting, precision osteotomies, infection control, external fixation, spinal exposure
49. Safe resection and anastomosis of bowel
50. Drainage of infection
51. Intensive care of SIRS, MOFS, CHF, Septic shock, postoperative fluid shifts
52. Nonsurgical and surgical management of lymphedema, seromas, and edema
53. First rib resection
54. Spinal exposure
55. Organ harvest and transplantation
56. Planning of complex open, hybrid, and endovascular procedures

Every year, it is apparent that endovascular options suffer from some flaw when outcomes are studied beyond 2 years, but progress will march on in that sphere. It has to. The loss of open capable surgeons to early retirement is accompanied by overapplication of endovascular techniques at least partly due to the lack of knowledge of these open surgical options and achievable good results and partly due to financial incentives. The solution lies in redistribution of reimbursement to open procedures and creation of open surgical fellowships and identifying and empowering mentors who still walk among us.

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opinion Practice training

The Mid-Century Vascular Surgeon

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A Mid-Century Modern Chair

Mid Century Modern is a design philosophy from the mid twentieth century that seemed terribly dated and out of style while I was growing up but now seems to have come back as people dig around their parents and grandparents’ stuff. Television shows like Mad Men and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are rotten with mid-century design. Yet it is an apt term for vascular surgeons of a certain generation like me who at about fifty years of age remember a time when vascular surgery was about big incisions and bypass grafts. We were trained in open vascular surgery and rode along with (or were drowned by) the tsunami of endovascular techniques that have come to dominate. Most of us learned to do them as well. Mid-century vascular surgeons straddle the divide between our mentors who, like me, specialized in vascular after completing general surgery training and the current trainees who have trained solely in vascular surgery. At one time it was fashionable to believe that we were fossils. But, like the coelacanth discovered after an eon’s absence, guidelines and recommendations are being made for open surgery which is supposed to be making a comeback. But it turns out, open surgery-capable vascular surgeons are, like the coelacanth, rare, and endangered. Unless we completely change the way we train people today, open vascular surgery will become extinct. At first glance, it does not look good.

The Dinosaur
My first ever encounter with a vascular surgeon was in 1989, as a lab tech in Boston the year after I graduated from college. It was at the West Roxbury VA Hospital, and like the vets, this one chain smoked in his office. Friendly enough, but a bit aloof, he rasped out well elocuted English in the same way soldiers did in old war movies like The Longest Day. Laconic and Robert Mitchum-like. He would have been among the first generations of vascular surgeons, contemporary to Jack Wylie, Michael DeBakey, and other luminaries. He couldn’t have cared less, I believe, as he performed fem-pop and aortobi-iliac and femoral bypasses and carotid endarterectomies with a furious incandescence that didn’t jibe with his reserved demeanor outside the OR. He was equally fierce to the residents when he had to scrub in to get them out of jam. But he was kind to the medical students and pre-meds like me. His type of surgeon is most definitely extinct, remembered only in old war stories like this.

What is it about my generation of surgeons? We remember things and balance the new against the old ways. We remember a time before work hours restrictions but are young enough to understand why it is not too healthy to work 120 hours a week. Yet we are also conflicted about the benefits we retained from that kind of training, now viewed with about as much approval as Sparta’s agoge system of child abuse and military training. I trained at the outset of laparoscopic surgery, so I did about 50 open cholecystectomies before learning how to do laparoscopic cholecystectomies. Most of my appendectomies were done open. As were my colectomies, gastrectomies, thyroidectomies, mastectomies, and yes, aortic surgeries, carotid endarterectomies, arteriovenous fistulae, and leg bypasses. And I did them.

We All Agreed…
This was the deal. You worked at 110%, fell exhausted and gave a little more, and you were rewarded. That meant being up all night on call, but after morning rounds, you could turn your pager off and operate all day. If you were learning, you had to be prepared by knowing the patient, the disease, the anatomy, and the operation. If you were teaching, you had to have the approval of the attending who would be somewhere nearby, and never happy if you grabbed them. If you were chief resident, you were basically junior staff and expected to run your service like a practice. The leash was longer for those who could, and short for those who could not. In the grade before mine, it was pyramidal, meaning there was attrition of those who could not progress. Like ringing the bell at Navy SEAL school in Coronado, people quit. Or were, rarely, fired. Being categorical was seen as a kind of entitlement by the disbelieving chiefs welcoming the new categorical interns. Dishonesty was the worst sin, but weakness, like showing fatigue or expressing a desire to have a life outside of work, was equally bad. And training was long. Four years of medical school, followed by five years of general surgery residency with mine extended by a year of research between third and fourth year, and then followed by a two-year vascular fellowship. By the time I was a full-fledged vascular surgeon, I had college friends who had actual homes and summer homes, children, divorces, and travels around the world. They had lived real adult lives. I started out on life at 35 where everyone else had done it at 21. But I had 1600 cases in my residency, of which over 300 were major vascular including 50 open aortic cases, and nearly 500 cases during my fellowship, adding another 100 aortic cases, most of them open, as it was the first years that EVAR was introduced. Nothing better in the world than to start a case with Ken Cherry quipping over your shoulder -“make me proud.” I finished my endovascular training apprenticed to Dan Clair during my first staff job at Columbia P&S -cue Dan intoning “you’re killing me” over the Cath Lab’s PA from the control desk on the weekends we had time in there.

There is no going back…
That represented one way of training a vascular surgeon. Even after graduating, I never stopped learning and perfecting my craft. The two years at Columbia gave me insight on how to run a practice completely alone -I was the lone vascular surgeon up at the Allen Pavilion on the northern tip of Manhattan next to Baker’s Field. It taught me the critical importance of availability and extracting useful information over my tiny flip phone. During my private practice years in Iowa, I learned the amazing productivity that can be attained when you work in collaboration and partnership with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons -something I do today here in the Heart and Vascular Institute. I also learned how to use vascular technologists and the lab as a force multiplier. And it was during the Iowa years that I underwent a period of endo-enthusiasm followed by a realism and I performed over a hundred aorto-bifemoral bypasses on middle aged patients with an average length of stay of 3 days, no deaths. When I plunged back into academia, taking a position at Cleveland Clinic, I was apprenticed again to Dan, but this time in understanding how to use the whole clinic as a tool for taking impossibly challenging patients through to an acceptable resolution. All of that started with those frantic days on call as an intern at St. Luke’s Hospital, drawing blood cultures, placing IV’s, babysitting traumas in the CT scanner, and putting chest tubes into the perforated. But there is no going back. It is most definitely probably illegal today to subject people to the intensity and duration of experience that I went through. And I wouldn’t trade that experience for all the treasure in the world (although I do regret not buying Apple, Dell, and Microsoft in 1994).

What a completely trained vascular surgeon can do
The hardest case that I have taken care of ever was at the Clinic a couple of years ago. The patient was a middle aged man who had ruptured an aortic aneurysm in another state some months prior and had undergone a repair complicated by a pancreatic injury along with some enterotomies resulting in a graft infection along with high output pancreatic and enteric fistulae from an open abdomen. He arrived cachectic, in septic shock and had a pseudoaneurysm from the distal anastomosis of a short tube graft. I immediately took him to the OR to place a stent graft across the pseudoaneurysm neck to prevent rupture and placed him on TPN to correct his cachexia. The abscesses and hematomata were drained percutaneously, and an effort was made to control the fistula with a heroic effort on the part of the ostomy team. He turned around and was able go to an LTAC on TPN and antibiotics. There he gained twenty pounds and returned flush and active. Stage two was three months later and done to replace the still infected grafts with cryopreserved homograft. I did this via a right retroperitoneal approach as the left side and abdomen were a mess from the inflammation. After I removed the grafts and sewed in the homograft, general surgery reorganized his bowel and discovered that he only had about 30cm of useable small bowel and would be on TPN for life. But he was alive and learning to walk again, and eventually came back 6 months later for follow-up and gave me a hug.

That case took all of my skill to solve, and I could not have done it without the whole hospital working in sync with me. When it comes my time, I wonder who would be able to do that for me?Who would manage my ruptured AAA properly and not have bowel and pancreatic injuries?

How to do a CABG according to Dr. Swistel
When I was an intern, I wanted to be a cardiac surgeon more than anything else, and got myself slotted for 6 months of cardiac during my second year. It was an unwanted rotation because of the 5am to 11pm hours, all nighters in the unit on call, and because the CT surgeons were notorious for not letting you do anything, except for Dan Swistel. Years before he had been one of us, a resident at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt and was Dr. George Green’s protege. He had a deal with us where he had you learn and master all the following steps in this order:
1. take vein
2. put in pacing wires and chest tubes
3. close chest
4. open chest
5. open the pericardium and set up the way he wanted
6. put the venous cannulas in
7. put the arterial cannulas and secondary lines in and go on bypass
8. decannulate and repair
9. dissect the aorta, set up and place the cross clamp
10. do the proximal anastomosis on the vein grafts
11. do the distal anastomosis on the vein grafts under the microscope which was the way he and Dr. Green did it.
12. dry up…really dry up and learn to come off pump
13. take mammary
14. book a ward service CABG and do it skin to skin

Through the history of St. Luke’s up to that point, most residents never got past taking vein. That was the great barrier, and most people really didn’t stick around after taking vein and closing the leg. They did not see the point of standing around and second or third assist. Those residents who were going to Cardiac did make it to taking the mammary, but only a handful by chief year. No one made it to 14. Dr. Swistel was always true to his word, even though some residents suspected this was all some bet that he had between himself and his brother who was not a cardiac surgeon -something about I can train a monkey to do this. To me, that last step, doing a CABG skin to skin, seemed like the final level of a very difficult computer game, like casting the One Ring into the volcano, like blowing up Agent Smith.

Every step on the ladder was something I immediately applied to my general surgery experience. On call and at home, I practiced. I practiced holding the instruments correctly and performing anastomoses on discarded grafts. I learned that every hard operation is made up of small technically feasible components, so I worked to make those moves natural and smooth. I progressed rapidly up the ladder and was by the end of my last cardiac rotation firmly at 13 on more than one occasion. Every other part of my skill set expanded during this time -central lines went smoothly, appendices and gall bladders were fished out efficiently, and fear shifted its focus to different things from what made me anxious as an intern. I learned the skill of keeping people alive through the night and making the call to take people back.

With some social engineering (ordering the cardiology fellows takeout Chinese) and vacation days traded, I got to that last step during my third year. If not a monkey, then at least Park. The act of learning and mastering each component skill lets you start and finish an operation. I don’t think Dr. Swistel was ever out to lunch while I was operating, but all those moments of letting me take the knife was crucial to my education and I am grateful to him and all my teachers, including my current partners and colleagues, as I approach PGY-25.   As surgical educators, we must recognize that surgery at the sharp end of the knife is a precision craft that has to be taught much as tennis is taught starting with grip, stance, swing. That golf is learned on a driving range with a bucket of balls.

The Mid-Century Vascular Surgeon
Like Mid-Century Modern Design furniture, surgeons in my cohort are sought after by hospitals and practices for being able to let a hospital do more. What do I mean? A urologist resecting a kidney with a renal vein tumor thrombus extending into the inferior vena cava needs to have someone expose, extract, and repair the vena cava. A gynecologist debulking retroperitoneal metastases needs to be able to call for help when part of the aorta needs to go with the tumor. Cardiac surgeons need to be able to place ECMO cannulas in imaginative locations and not lose extremities in the process. A thoracic surgeon resecting a Pancoast tumor needs a vascular surgeon to repair the subclavian artery and vein. An orthopedic surgeon resecting a spindle cell tumor from the thigh needs help reconstructing the femoral artery and vein. And so on. We are safety net, the fire brigade, the SEAL team, and unfortunately many hospitals understand only when their last fully trained, full service vascular surgeon retires.

 

Vascular surgeons are a keystone species in a hospital’s ecosystem. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, it was noticed that decades later the forests returned to their ancient glory, that wetlands flourished breeding fish and insects and small mammal species, and the secondary predators that feed on them, and many missing bird species returned. Vascular surgeons capable of operating on the whole body as well as intervening on the whole body are increasingly a missing element in a hospital. And many of us chose to go missing -into our private endovascular suites and vein centers because it often does not pay to go do a 5-hour bypass when you can do three femoral angioplasties for claudication in the same time. Reading 10 carotid ultrasounds is easier on the back and more renumerative than a carotid endarterectomy. And I am not judging -it is a rational choice that is framed by the way healthcare is reimbursed.

The solution starts in the US with a shift in reimbursement to recognize the time and effort required to perform open vascular surgery well and to reward the programs and surgeons who are consistently good. Training in open vascular surgery will be sought after much as everyone wanted to be a cardiac surgeon back in the 1970’s. Government and society mandates set the menu, but the economics determine what is served.

And finally, every year thousands of surgeon-years of experience is retiring with the very skills that are now sought after. Rather than lose this human capital to golf courses and beaches, we should be grabbing them at the door.  Like those mid-century chairs and tables, we have always been there somewhere, and its time to make some more.