Dr. Catherine DeVries
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Catherine DeVries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That was back sort of in the era where there were true general urologists. And at Kaiser at that time, we were. And so I would one day be doing a radical prostatectomy and the next day, posterior urethral valves. That was the way it was. And the other thing is we didn't have residents or trainees.
And so we mostly scrubbed with techs and sometimes with a partner if it was a really challenging case.
There was one other who was at a nearby Kaiser. Jackie Newman was also she had trained in Chicago. And she was up at another Kaiser north of me and we became friends. So it was very nice to have somebody else in the neighborhood.
I think what did it was that I had by that time started working internationally. When I had been at Stanford, one of my professors, Don Laub, who founded Interplast, currently it's called Research, had invited me to go do hypospadias surgery. And we started in Honduras and subsequently in Vietnam and Cuba. But even though I thought I was well-trained, I was a little insecure.
I wasn't sure I was doing the surgery as well as I possibly could be doing the surgery. And I didn't think you could do everything in urology equally well. In other words, I couldn't do stones and oncology and pediatric and everything else equally well.
And I felt sort of insecure about that, especially since I was going to teach some of these practices in places where admittedly my experience was greater than most of the people I was working with. And yet, I wanted to be an expert, and I wanted to feel secure in that. So I went to San Diego to do the fellowship.
I think it was the only one year fellowship at the time, but that was fine with me because I was already board certified. I had already been working on my own. In fact, back in that time, they could bill for me, you know, because I could run my own clinic and I was already licensed in the state of California. So as a fellow, In fact, I think I did get a faculty appointment.
Now I think all that's changed. But at the time, it was really great to see that not only had I not been doing it badly before, but I learned some new tricks, as one always does. And I felt a lot more confident having spent that time. The other thing is that as pediatric urology was defining itself as a specialty, in order to more or less join the club, you had to have done a fellowship.
Everybody had to do a fellowship. And if you didn't, you were one of those general urologists who liked doing pediatric urology, but you weren't, you couldn't really call yourself a pediatric urologist in that way. It was kind of an exclusive club.
And I really do feel that it's a good thing to have a broad experience, to have experience working on one's own, to get out of academics, even if we're coming back, to be the one responsible. You know, the team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care.
And I think that's valuable. And it also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
and you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language but you can work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience, you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere.
And I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience, especially if they go directly from their training.
Yeah, so I went to Augusta. Actually, this is a bit of my personality situation. There were some opportunities where I could have gone to be somebody's junior partner. I did want to set up my own program, and Augusta, they needed a pediatric urologist there. So at that time, then I was also the only female urologist on the faculty.
And also, I was on call 24-7 for five years because I was the only pediatric urologist there. And so that was a very good experience in surgical terms. I also had, for the first couple of years, a 5-8 appointment to the VA hospital. So I still took care of adults. And, you know, I like taking care of adults.
I was, during that time, also working with colleagues from the CDC doing reconstructive urology on adults with lymphatic filariasis. which is a terrible condition, also known as elephantiasis. But many people will have seen pictures in textbooks about how men can get terrible scrotal, big hydroseals, and in addition, also leg edema.
And in certain parts of the world, it is a terrible, terrible condition. And so I worked a lot with the CDC to develop standards for that, also with WHO. And so with reconstructive urologists, before reconstructive urology became its own thing. There were just a few people who were really doing it a lot, kind of well-known for it.
Jerry Jordan and Jack McAninch were some of the big guys at that time. And I learned a lot from them when I was doing more than just the pediatrics, but the reconstruction for the adults.
Yeah, I looked around at a lot of different places and oddly, one of the reasons why Utah looked so good was the airport. So if you are working in a big city and it takes you an hour to get from where you live and work into the airport,
And at that time, we had to take all the equipment we were going to be using because in many places you couldn't be sure that the suction would work, the cautery would work, even the anesthesia medications would be available. So we had to take everything in great big plastic boxes and we'd take them all over the planet. And so it matters how you can get all of these things through customs.
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