Failed Back Surgery Personal Statement

In August of my first year of medical school, I received an email offering an opportunity to pursue neurosurgical spine outcomes research. Unbeknownst to me, this email and correspondence would ultimately lead to my decision to pursue a career in neurological surgery.

I had been involved with basic science research every year of my undergraduate career. Yet I had never been exposed to clinical outcomes research and thought this would be a great opportunity to learn a new skill set and explore a different avenue of research. The first projects I worked on involved patient-reported outcomes on Failed Back Surgery Syndrome. Our aim was to quantify patients’ improvement in pain, disability, and quality of life after revision surgery, and my role

She was a young woman – in her 40’s – who was married with two children. She had been suffering from fatigue and headaches for several months, but it was the development of weakness on the right side of her body that finally prompted her to seek medical care. Her work-up included an MRI, which revealed a large left-sided enhancing tumor with central heterogeneous signal near the motor cortex with associated edema. After careful consideration and much talk with the family, the patient was admitted to the neurosurgery service and her tumor was resected. The pathology report confirmed the diagnosis that we had all feared and suspected: glioblastoma multiforme. Some people may see such a case as representing the futile and unsatisfactory nature of neurosurgery; glioblastoma is almost uniformly fatal with a median survival of around 1-2 years after resection, making surgery palliative in nature. Grim stories like this turn many aspiring medical students away from the field of neurosurgery, whereas for me, it is exactly the opposite. Harvey Cushing famously said, “A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man – he must view the man in his world.” This young woman and her family had their entire world collapse within a matter of days and if it weren’t for surgery, she would have died within weeks. The resection of this tumor likely did not cure the patient of disease but rather extended her life for several months, giving her invaluable time with family and friends. Not all patients in neurosurgery have such a poor prognosis, but this example illustrates the fact that neurosurgeons have the great privilege of treating some of the sickest and most vulnerable patients in all of medicine. Compassionately helping patients and families navigate the hardships of