By Chris Motola
Q: How long have you been with St. Joe’s?
A: I just started the 15th of September.
Q: What’s your impression been so far? How has the integration process gone?
A: So my impression so far is that it’s been a wonderful place to work. Everyone’s very friendly. Everyone seems to be working hard to get me on board and help me figure things out and find my way around the hospital. The staff’s excellent and everyone seems concerned with doing what’s best for the patient, of course. So there is no hesitation to talk to the nurse, the PA, the physician if there’s a question, which is great. And it’s really making adjusting very easy.
Q: What put St. Joe’s on your map when you were job searching?
A: So I am originally from the suburbs of Chicago, but I started dating a girl from Upstate or Western New York. To be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly sure where the line between the two is, but I’m sure that’s something I’ll learn while being here. But when it came time to look for a job out of fellowship, we sort of looked in both those areas, both in the Chicagoland area and in the Upstate New York area. We looked online for different resources to try and find something, and St. Joe’s popped up. I had applied to a lot of different places and I thought that was kind of unique. They had a very nice touch that, rather than hearing from a form letter of, “Hey, OK, nice to meet you, let’s set up a whatever and we’ll give you a little more information,” it was someone from the hospital reaching out, someone who knew the area and a lot about the position, which was more than any other place I talked to at that point had done. So it kind of set the tone of “We care about our positions, we want you to do well, we want you to succeed here.” And even when talking to him, he was like, “You know, full disclosure, our rival across the street is also potentially hiring. So if you don’t think this is good for you, we want you to want to be here and we want you to be successful.” Which I appreciated.
Q: You are a vascular surgeon. What sort of conditions do you operate on?
A: So we pretty much work on every blood vessel except the ones inside your skull and the heart. So everywhere else is our territory. It’s one of the things I like the best about vascular surgery. We can do huge mass operations, involving your chest, your belly or we can do smaller operations just through a catheter and everything in between. But we treat arteries, we treat veins, we treat your legs, we treat your neck to reduce your stroke, we treat aneurysms. We get to treat the whole body, which is kind of nice.
Q: With surgeons, you sometimes get a one-and-done relationship with patients. How well do vascular surgeons get to know their patients?
A: Yeah, actually that’s kind of one of the unique things about vascular surgery and one of the reasons why I like it. Unfortunately, for better or for worse, vascular disease is sort of a chronic ongoing process, so you do end up seeing a lot of same patients over and over again. And they still need routine follow-ups to make sure that veins stay open, to make sure the condition doesn’t progress and sometimes to fix it if it does recur.
Q: What are some interesting developments in your field?
A: I guess this isn’t that recent, but the biggest development was the advent of the endovascular realm, which is, say, everything used to be a big incision, and we would connect blood vessels via veins or via prosthetic grafts. Now, we can do a lot of that same work all through catheters, through the arteries themselves. That has been around since the late ‘90s, but we’re kind of continually pushing the boundary of what we can do endovascularly. So the original repairs of aneurysms were done with a single piece of endograft that you kind of put in and then connect to each leg. And now we’re doing these complicated pre-built grafts. For example, next week we have a patient who has an aneurysm that extends from their chest into their belly. It used to be they would require a surgery that would go into their chest, put them on bypass and then we would fix it. The chances of being paralyzed was above 30% to 40%. The chance of having a heart attack and stroke and all these other things were massive. Instead, we’re going to make three small incisions in the leg and in the arm and we’re going to put a graft in that doesn’t have to be custom built, that doesn’t have to be modified in any way. They’ll go home in two or three days compared to being in the hospital for like two or three weeks.
Q: What general advice would you give to a patient afterwards to reduce the likelihood that they would need further treatment.
A: So, by far and away, the biggest cause of vascular disease is smoking. And no matter what we do, no matter how good of a repair we do, if you continue smoking, it’s going to come back and it’s going to come back likely even worse than it started. Otherwise just be exercising and eating healthy.
Q: What advice would you have for a medical student who is looking to get into your specialty?
A: I would say, one, just be curious. It’s not the most well-known field. I didn’t know about it until halfway through medical school. I feel like it’s underrepresented. Certainly, your orthopedic surgeries, your neurosurgeries, everyone kind of knows what those are. But if you talk to the average person, they don’t exactly know what vascular surgeons do. So just being curious and, once you learn about it, see if you’re interested. Meet people. Talk to people. See if you like it. It is hard, so you have to make sure you really want to do it. It is a small community still, so a lot of people know each other. They can introduce you to each and open up opportunities.
Lifelines
Name: Patrick Sowa, M.D.
Position: Vascular surgeon at St. Joseph’s Health
Education: Bachelor of Science in biomedical engineering from Saint Louis University in Missouri; Doctor of Medicine at Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University in Illinois
Career: General surgery internship at Rush University Medical Center and general surgery residency at Ascension St. Joseph Medical Center (both in Chicago) where he was the chief resident. Before coming to Syracuse, completed a vascular surgery fellowship at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. Has certifications in endoscopic and laparoscopic surgery
Hometown: Wheaton, Illinois
Affiliations: St. Joseph’s Health
Organizations: American College of Surgeons; Society for Vascular Surgery
Family: Two nieces
Hobbies: Golfing, kayaking, hiking, swimming, exploring nature