In the latest Corner Stitch column, medical student Bailey Richardson recounts the deeply personal life events that led to her unique journey into vascular surgery.
Despite requesting transplant for my third-year surgery rotation as a medical student, I got placed on vascular surgery. I remember sitting with my mama, debating if I should try to switch. Ultimately, I left it alone, letting fate decide. Fast forward to my second week on service, I heard the residents discuss a patient in the emergency department with a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Quickly, one of the MS4s and I searched the board, trying to figure out who it could be, in the hopes of getting to follow the case into the operating room (OR). When I saw my mentor’s name on the screen, my heart stopped; I felt empty. I rushed to the bay, only to find him in his neatly pressed blue-and-white stripped pajamas, smiling, and telling me that he was going to be “alright.” Despite developing a non-intervenable endoleak weeks after his life-saving operation, I will forever cherish the extra time I spent with him and his family prior to sending him home in his last days.
Meanwhile, in the midst of my mentor’s hospital stay, my grandmother was admitted for surgical treatment of her symptomatic AAA. Though her initial fenestrated endovascular aneurysm repair (FEVAR) was successful, her course was riddled with postoperative pseudoaneurysms requiring multiple take-backs. Frequent intubations, combined with her severe cardiopulmonary disease (COPD) and other comorbidities, ultimately resulted in a two-month stay in the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU).
Those days were long, and, honestly, my own personal hell. I knew just enough in medicine at the time to understand her poor prognosis. Deep down, I knew that this was not the vascular team’s fault in any way, shape or form. Her outcomes were a perfect storm of poor overall health and, frankly, bad luck. She was the first person I watched die.
For a long time after losing both my mentor and grandmother, on a service that had piqued my interest, I was terrified to go near the team. I didn’t want to be looked at as the “poor medical student” who was involved with two recent deaths. Things improved as time went on, and my heart slowly shifted. I stopped looking at what I had lost and focused on what I had gained: insight and perspective. It wasn’t until my fourth year, on vascular surgery again, that I realized the invisible ties that had been there all along, pulling me to the field where I belong.
The patient population in vascular surgery is very special. They often have multiple comorbidities, requiring physicians to be technically advanced in both surgery and medicine. Growing up in a two-redlight town in rural South Carolina, I can easily relate to the stubborn and misunderstood population.
By pursuing this field, I will fulfill deep-rooted goals that I had not realized until my fourth year of medical school: patient continuity, medical complexity and innovation. I am blessed that, one day, I will get to see aspects of both my mentor and grandmother in my patients, thus reminding me of the magnitude of my duty as a future vascular surgeon.
Bailey Richardson is a fourth-year medical student at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
