Catching up with Carolyn Luppens, MD

I haven’t had quite as long as most of the other alumni to accumulate updates, having only finished residency in 2021. Nevertheless, I remember in medical school when I realized I really did want to be a surgeon doing the math and figuring out how old I was probably going to be when I finally made it out of training. It’s wild to be standing on the other side looking back. The days are long but the years are short, etc… Every seemingly trite adage just rings more true the longer I’m in the game. 

After leaving Utah I completed a two-year fellowship in Trauma and Critical Care at the University of New Mexico. I was looking to round out my surgical training with experience at a center with a high-volume of penetrating trauma, and Albuquerque certainly had that to offer. I learned a ton, but also fellowship helped me appreciate and further reinforce the quality of training I received in Utah. I was able to take full advantage of the experience because I had such a strong foundation. As I have moved through other institutions, I have been confronted by the fact that high-quality surgical education is not inevitable, and I am so grateful to have trained somewhere that turned me into a competent surgeon. 

For pretty much all of residency when anyone I newly met would ask me what I did for work I would say something like “I’m in surgical training” or “I’m a General Surgery resident,” which is a bad way to answer that question because no one has any idea what that means unless they have had some connection to the obscure hierarchy of medical education. I would almost always have to awkwardly explain what “surgical training” meant in greater detail and, I feared, would come off as ever more insufferable. But I couldn’t bring myself to say simply “I am a surgeon” because I knew that I really wasn’t a surgeon yet, and pretending to the title amounted to unconscionable hubris. 

I’m not exactly sure at what point I decided I had crossed the threshold and finally managed to utter the words “I am a surgeon” without feeling like a complete fraud. Passing the boards was a milestone. More impactful though was earning the trust and respect of the residents in New Mexico, being judged as competent by people with whom I hadn’t had years to build a reputation, and finally standing alone in the trauma bay, in the ICU, or in the OR when confronted with a challenging case and having the confidence to know I will be safe and smart; I will figure out what the (or at least a) right thing to do is, and I will be able to execute that plan. Still, every day I’m in practice reinforces that part of earning that confidence is, and will always be, knowing when to ask for help. 

There is not a day at work that I don’t hear a mentor’s voice in my head helping me figure out how to do the right thing for the patient. I sort of feel like Dr. Nirula will always be standing just behind me whispering, making sure I’m staying two steps ahead of the trauma resuscitation or asking me “what is this patient’s volume status.” I do my hand-sewn anastomoses the way Dr. Scaife and Dr. Ott taught me. Dr. Nelson, you taught me how to drive a needle and the proper way to hold a Goelet in an inguinal hernia repair. I promise I only ever close the Kocher one click on the fascia, Dr. Vargo. Dr. Huang very wisely told me during my chief year that you can’t only do cases you feel perfectly comfortable doing or your scope of practice will stagnate. Dr. Savarise is the reason I had the courage to take a job that was going to make me happy, and the reason I even know what that might look like. 

Since finishing fellowship in 2023, I moved to Bend, Oregon with my partner, Sam, and our dog, Indigo, where I found an excellent job working as an Acute Care Surgeon at St. Charles Hospital, a Level 2 Trauma Center and the primary health care system in Central Oregon.

Now that I have more control over my life and my schedule I am getting to rediscover the parts of myself that, out of necessity, fell to the wayside during training. It has been a pleasure to be able to “read more,” and not in the way that phrase is meant when it appears on end-of-rotation evaluations. 

Central Oregon is a fantastic place to get to explore new hobbies and re-discover old ones. Now I get to travel more, see friends more, spend more time with my family and my dog, write more, sleep more, ski on uncrowded blue-bird weekdays, and float the river while some big act plays a concert at the amphitheater. 

I’ll be in SLC at the end of January for my annual pilgrimage to the Sundance Film Festival and will do my best to catch up with as many people as I can!