A Doctor's Weekend, Set Aside for Learning

For many people, weekends are for rest, for time with family.

But this past weekend, a group of spine surgeons from different hospitals gave up two days of their weekend to keep learning.

The first day was lectures and shared experience. The second moved into the cadaver surgical simulation lab, hands-on with various spine surgery techniques all day. The course wrapped up Sunday evening. The next day, Monday, everyone was back at the hospital, continuing with rounds, clinic, and surgery.

This might be part of what makes this job different: passing your board exams doesn't mean the learning stops.

This is especially true in surgery. So much of it can't be fully learned from books, papers, or videos. The angle, the sequence, the judgment calls during an operation, even a movement that looks small, are often built on years of accumulated experience.

With support from the hospital's leadership, I helped organize this course together with Director Chien-Chou Pan, inviting a number of outstanding spine surgeons from around Taiwan to Taichung Veterans General Hospital for cadaver-based surgical demonstrations and teaching, giving younger physicians the chance to watch up close, ask questions directly, and get hands-on practice themselves.

I also specially invited a good friend of mine, Dr. Wataru Narita, from Japan, to come share his expertise.

He has long specialized in cervical spine surgery, and this time demonstrated cervical laminoplasty live, completing the entire procedure smoothly and precisely in thirty minutes.

Even though I was one of the instructors for this event, watching from the side, I learned a great deal myself.

A younger physician might be learning an entirely new technique. After years of doing surgery ourselves, what we notice might instead be a better step, a different way of handling something, or a small detail we hadn't paid particular attention to before.

So over these two days, the trainees were learning, and so was I.

This year's course happened to fall on the weekend of August 8th, Father's Day.

In my son's summer homework, the page for Father's Day had a photo of the two of us pasted onto it. But that day, I wasn't actually with him. I was at the venue, teaching and learning alongside everyone else.

Seeing that page still gave me pause.

Physicians play many different roles. We're also fathers, someone else's family. Time is always limited, and we can only choose between different responsibilities.

So seeing so many younger physicians willing to give up a weekend to keep learning genuinely moved me.

I hope what they take home isn't just a new technique, but also a lasting drive to keep improving.