Dr. Michael Egnor is an academic Pediatric Neurosurgeon based in NY. We discuss his long career in the field and his thoughts about what you should know. Michael has been out of fellowship training now for 26 years and is currently a faculty member at Stony Brook University.
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When Michael was very young, his mother had a brain aneurysm that ruptured. She survived but she had some neurological sequelae. So even when he was young, he was already involved with neurosurgeons.
He thought that to be a neurosurgeon was the pinnacle of what one could accomplish in terms of profession. Moreover, he found medicine fascinating. He recalls that he read a book Not as a Stranger back in high school. It was a novel about a doctor but the title just fascinated him. The title actually came from a passage in the Chapter 19 of Job in the Bible. Job was asked how he deals with all of the horror he experienced and all the terrible things he has seen. He knows what he's going through ultimately will allow him to see life and actually to see God, not as a stranger. That is if you would come to know him and what it means to be him in an intimate way.
"To be a physician, you get to see in an intimate way what life is all about and understand what it means to be a human being."
He was also inspired by Dr. Christiaan Barnard who was the first surgeon to perform a heat transplant. He recalls seeing the news about it as a kid and got fascinated by it. He is specifically fascinated by congenital heart defects. As well, the brain fascinated him. That said, he knew he wanted to be a doctor and a surgeon, just not sure as to what kind.
Then he went to the army in high school because he needed money to go to college. He served as a medic in the army for three years. And getting accepted to college, it gave him a deferred admission so he started college when he was 20. Right after college, he went to medical school. Being older going to college, he considers himself being more focused than some of his classmates. He knew what he wanted to do so he worked really hard to get into medical school.
Out of medical school, still undecided between neurosurgery and cardiac surgery, he started general surgery internship in Mt. Sinai in New York. And halfway through his internship, he realized he wanted to do neurosurgery. He knew that 20-30 years down the road, he would still be fascinated by the brain and not as much by the heart.
So he applied outside of the match. He called neurosurgery programs.They needed a resident at the University of Miami so he went there with his newly married wife. He spent six years in Miami, training in neurosurgery and came back to Long Island where his wife's family is from. Then he got a job at Stony Brook as one of the faculty.
Not that the heart isn't a wonderful topic of research, it struck him as a fascinating machine. But with the brain, he thinks you can take the knowledge much further. The other thing that enthralled him was neuroanatomy and how the brain was structured. To him, it was like almost as I if he was learning a secret to what life was all about and it was in the structure of the brain. So he felt the brain would keep him interested indefinitely. While the heart for him was to mechanical for him.
"Almost as I if I was learning a secret to what life was all about and it was in the structure of the brain."
He didn't get out of training as a pediatric neurosurgery, He did general neurosurgery but he has...
