Transcript

Medicine is a difficult specialty, and surgery is a particularly difficult one, and it requires a lot of hours and training in the process. I had four years of college, four years of medical school, five years of general surgery, two years of plastic surgery training, and people ask me, well why did you invest so much time into this; this is a real piece of your life that you lost; that you could have been doing other things. And actually I think about it as the opposite, I think it’s as a period of time where I found my passion, where I found my interest, where I found my skill and where I dedicated my ten thousand hours into learning my craft and learning my specialty. Even in plastic surgery, there are sad parts of it. We take care of children who are badly burned, we take care of children who have very severe birth defects: cleft lip and cleft pallet –things like that– Spina Bifida, hand deformities. There is a big component of plastic surgery that is not just frivolous fluff that you think about in Beverly Hills. And one of the things that I enjoy very much is taking some time away and actually going to foreign countries. I’ve been to Costa Rica, I’ve been to Peru, I’ve been to Ecuador, I’ve been to Mexico, doing missions where we take care of children –and some adults– who really need us; who really have nothing; who really appreciate it. And it allows me to get back what I’ve spent in my hours to really enjoy my craft and really kind of refresh myself, and to remember why I went into plastic surgery and why it’s my passion. I’m Dr. Lawrence Koplin, and thank you for listening.