Speaker 1:
To be able to help the kids optimize their activities to really reach their potential as adults is really a very gratifying thing to be able to do for this many years.
I do a lot of planning beforehand. I have a little playbook when I go to the operating room that I fill out and I hang right next to me about how I'm going to take care of the problem, what I'm aiming for, my goals. The 3D printed models are, for me, such a step forward because I can get my hands on it, especially it's life size, so I can see where the anatomy is. It really has a huge impact on what we can do and should do in surgery.
We have such a wonderful group of individuals supporting the surgeries all the way from the pre-op area to the intraoperative nurses and the postoperative care that I don't have to worry about every little step of the way because the dedication of the therapists and nurses and nurse practitioners here that I get to focus on doing the surgery. But it is one of the most, I think, physically transformative surgeries that the human body can undergo is in musculoskeletal medicine, because you can see it, you can see people standing different, walking different, throwing different, all these things they can do better, alleviate pain, discomfort, improve function. Those are all wonderful things that we can do, and it is very rewarding to see the big changes that we make.
We have the fortunate association affiliation with Washington University, and what that allows us to do is to bring in pediatric orthopedic surgeons, and sometimes our adult colleagues will come over and they bring their A game every day they walk through. Every one of us has area of interest, some of us are highly specialized, like in spine, Dr. Goldfarb and Wall are in hand, Dr. Gordon and Miller are really experts in limb deformity and limb lengthening. There's no generalists here, so what you're getting is someone who's coming in and you're getting the person who's been writing the chapters and presenting all the papers around the country and the world and teaching everybody how to do this. You're truly getting experts in every single area of pediatric orthopedics.
