Students watch heart surgery through observation program
Lindsey Hollabaugh provides information about the aortic valve replacement that Mt. Lebanon High School students observed at Allegheny General Hospital.
Dr. Stephen Bailey answers students’ questions following the surgery.
The observation area is one floor above an operating room.
When you have the opportunity to witness open-heart surgery, you’re going to see blood.
“I thought I was going to have an issue with that,” Mt. Lebanon High School junior Allison Jones admitted. “Most people do. As the time went on, I got used to the sight, and it became easier for me to watch.”
She and a select group of classmates recently traveled to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh to watch Dr. Stephen Bailey perform an aortic valve replacement as part of the North Side medical center’s Open Heart Surgery Observation Program. This fall, students from Upper St. Clair and Bethel Park high schools were among those throughout the region who also participated in the program.
For Allison, the experience was much more enlightening than listening to lectures and seeing diagrams in advanced placement anatomy class.
“Actually watching it being performed gives a better understanding,” she said. “Now, if I take a test on the heart, I could probably ace it.”
Students are able to view surgical procedures from an observation area one floor above an operating room, and magnified images appear simultaneously on a large TV monitor.
During Mt. Lebanon’s visit, Lindsey Hollabaugh, assistant coordinator for surgery observation, was on hand to guide students through their witnessing an aortic valve replacement.
“They’re going to check for leaks,” she said at one point, motioning to the close-up scenes of the heart on the monitor. “They don’t want there to be any leaks here, around where they were working, because they don’t want to have to open up this patient again. So they’ll check for leaks pretty extensively.”
The subject of the surgery was a 52-year-old man.
“This is a relatively straightforward technical problem,” Bailey said. “The patient was a little bit complicated because his heart was sick, but it went very smoothly.”
Bailey, a Mt. Lebanon resident with four children in the school district, met with the students after the procedure to answer their questions. One of the first questions they asked was how long he studied to become a doctor.
“Four years of college, four years of med school, and then, for me, it was five years of general surgery,” he explained, followed by a year of doing research and two years of cardiac surgery as a resident.
The students did the math, and that adds up to 16 years.
“When I was in your spot, in high school, I had no interest or thought of going to medical school, at all,” Bailey recalled. “I remember meeting a guy who was graduating from college and going to med school, and I thought that was crazy. The thought of all that more schooling was just foreign to me.
“Then I spent a month with a general surgeon during my junior year of college and had a really good experience,” he said, “and that kind of kick-started me taking pre-med my senior year.”
He certainly encourages students to consider careers in medicine.
“There are any number of different pathways,” Bailey said. “You don’t have to do 16 years of education. You can go to high school and some technical school, and be right at that same table as a surgical tech.”
The observation program has hosted more than 10,000 area students since its 2008 debut.
“It gives them a heads-up as to what to look for,” Kathleen Konechny, Mt. Lebanon High School gifted coordinator, said. “It helps them decide if, yes, this is right for me, or no, they’d better think about something else.”
Allison is one student who thinks working in the medical field may be right for her.
“I’m so thankful for this opportunity, and I know everyone else is, too,” she said. “It’s amazing.”