Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/745998
t m c » p u l s e | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 6 30 30 TMC SPOTLIGHT ALAN LUMSDEN, M.D., is medical director of the Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center at Houston Methodist Hospital. He spoke with Pulse—in his Scottish burr—about the Baylor-Methodist schism, the spirit of Dr. DeBakey, and the natural kinship between surgeons and engineers. Q | Tell us a bit about your childhood. A | I was raised in a very small Scottish town of 10,000 people. I went to elementary school and high school in this town where my father was the town phar- macist. It was the only pharmacy in town—we called it the chemist's shop, of course. Then I made the big trip, 20 miles away, direct from high school to medical school in Edinburgh. I was 17; no need to go to college in the U.K. I took a year off halfway through my medi- cal training to complete a degree in pathology, which was incredibly valuable. I was exposed to surgical specimens, to the pathology of disease. I was always interested in anatomy, physiology and pathology and when you combine all those things together, what you get is surgery. Q | At what point did you leave Scotland for the United States? A | I was never really planning to emigrate. I hap- pened to be performing an autopsy one day, and there was an American medical student there, doing an elective in our foreign land. Well, that changed the direction of my entire life—romance in the autopsy room! And that led me to emigrate. It was not an easy transition. Ultimately, I received an offer to join the general surgery residency at Emory University in Atlanta. Q | What was the focus of your training at Emory? A | I did my general surgery residency and then a vascular fellowship. After training I joined the faculty and subsequently went on to become the chief of the division of vascular surgery. Q | What was it about vascular surgery that intrigued you? A | I remember being on the rotation at the VA as a junior-level resident. One of the fellows said, 'You should think about doing vascular surgery.' At that time I couldn't have imagined anything worse. But once you start getting into the procedures, they're very interesting and technically challenging and immedi- ately gratifying. At that time I also loved trauma. The challenges faced by trauma surgeons were the big vas- cular injuries; those are the injuries patients died from. So, I actually did the vascular fellowship with a plan to be a trauma surgeon. Halfway through my fellowship, I was offered the opportunity to join the Emory vascu- lar faculty, and jumped at the chance. Q | At that time, what were we doing for patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms [AAA]? A | It was all open aortic surgery or nothing. A big operation. A bloody operation. The patient was in ICU for a night or more, in hospital for a week to 10 days. It'd take two months to get over it.