Eric

For those of you who aren't in medicine, ill let you in on a secret: there's an (un)spoken rivalry between surgeons and internists/pediatricians. We approach problems from different perspectives and don't always see eye to eye. And internists/pediatricians have an additional frustration because we are often left to clean up the mess that surgeons leave.

But here, surgeons (and neonatologists) are the ones truly saving lives. And I have been more than happy to clean up after them.

Eric Halvorson is probably the most important and impressive volunteer at the hospital. He is a plastic surgeon from Chapel Hill (which is not the reason he's awesome, but it sure as hell doesn't hurt).

He operates between 12-15 hours everyday--and he's not doing breast augmentations or nose jobs. He, with help from the other couple of surgeons here, takes on any case that comes in, from traumas to bowel resections to fasciotomies to scheduled cases. In between surgeries, you can find him around doing consults on post-op patients and wound care problems. And he does it all with a smile on his face.

But it isn't his technical abilities as a surgeon that make him a great doctor: he was in on the 7pm interdisciplinary meeting that I wrote about, advocating for a patient that he barely knew and had never operated on. And then, afterward, went back to surgeries.

And when he was done a few hours later, he came back out, smiling, and had a couple of beers with everyone else.