Robert Whitfield MD traces his journey to becoming a breast reconstruction surgeon, shaped by his sister's cancer diagnosis and his mother's metastatic recurrence. He trained in general surgery at Indiana University starting in 1996, then learned microsurgical techniques from prominent surgeons including William Zamboni and Dr. Coleman.
Basically going to college and volunteering in ICUs in Las Vegas. I became very interested in surgery, working in the intensive care units and specifically the surgical intensive care units, and got to observe all sorts of different types of surgery, orthopedic surgery, oncologic surgeries, cardiac surgeries, and really became enamored with cardiac surgery. Once I got into medical school, I thought that would probably be my avenue. It was about two, three weeks into medical school, I got a call from my sister. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and wanted to know since I was her little brother in medical school, what should she do? Having been a medical student for all of three weeks, I immediately went to my professor who that day actually went, was an oncologist who was teaching us. So he was a clinician. And I spoke to him after class and he said he would talk to one of his colleagues where my sister lived and arranged for her to be seen. And that was very gracious of him. He did that. And I was able to fly home and be with her for her first chemotherapy infusion. Was quite interesting experience. So early on we had challenges with taking care of folks in my family with breast cancer and other forms of cancer, actually. So basically toward the end of my third year of medical school, I got a call from my mother. She was having difficulty, had abdominal pain, and so she was going to see a GI doctor and have a workup. And that didn't really show anything, but she kept having pain. So I implored her to get a CAT scan and her doctors helped get her a CAT scan. And she had basically metastatic cancer. And she had had a hysterectomy when I was very young for a cervical cancer. And this is a recurrent form of that cancer. It was biopsied and there was nothing more. It's not a surgical problem at this point. It's more will it respond to chemotherapy and radiation therapy. So she began those during my fourth year of medical school and didn't do well in the first three or four months. So I moved back home and stayed with her and had all of my surgical and other clerkships changed to be at home in Las Vegas with her. I got to work with probably one of the preeminent plastic surgeons in the United States, definitely at that time, if not the world. His name is William Zamboni, phenomenal plastic surgeon at that point. The only chairman of a surgery program who happened to be a plastic surgeon. Phenomenal in terms of technique, brilliant problem solver. And I was a fourth year medical student learning from him and he was literally like the number one role model you could have as a plastic surgeon, if that's what you aspire to be. But back then, I was pretty stubborn, and I just wanted to do heart surgery. So going into surgical training, because I was a traditional route at that point, and in 1996, and I trained at Indiana University for six years. About halfway through that period of time in training, it became apparent that cardiac surgery was not exactly what I wanted to do, based on what was happening with both fields of cardiology and cardiac surgery. And my most favorite aspect of it was pediatric cardiac surgery. So one thing led to another, and I did a year of really vascular laboratory training in that lab year. I really liked working with an operating microscope and under microscope in general in the lab. And then it just became a natural evolution, actually, in the microvascular surgery, which was commonly performed for oncologic reconstruction in plastic surgery. It became the field of choice for me was plastic surgery. I could perform oncologic reconstruction with microvascular technique. You could perform reconstruction for trauma and other either serious injuries or infections. And so I aspired to be a plastic surgeon. I stayed at Indian university for another two years and trained under Dr. Coleman. And then as I was leaving, I wanted to get additional microsurgical experience, so I went and spent another year with Dr. Zamboni back in Las Vegas. And so they're bringing it all full circle. Once my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and elected to have mastectomies, Dr. Zamboni did her breast reconstruction, and I stayed with her in the hospital during that time. So I've always had and always will have a very big spot in my heart for breast cancer patients. Breast cancer survivors just were shaped by our experiences, and that's certainly a big one in my life.
