Surgery Secrets with Dr. Mark Dykstra

Introduction & Quickfire Questions

[00:00] Hello and welcome to Surgery Secrets, where we go behind the scenes to uncover secrets about surgery you won't hear in the classroom. My name is Isabelle and today we are sitting down with Dr. Mike Dykstra. Let's get started. So first we'll begin with some quick findings.

[00:20] kind of short answer questions. So can you tell us her name? Sure. So I'm Mark Dykstra. And what is your occupation? I'm a general and colorectal surgeon at the University Hospital in Edmonton. And what does your job entail? So I have an elective colorectal practice which involves

[00:40] involves surgical oncology for colon and rectal cancer, as well as benign practice which includes inflammatory bowel disease, and then I also do some anorectal surgery. So those are the surgeries I do and then also I do colonoscopies and then clinic so pre-op, post-op.

[01:00] practice my elective practice and then for my emergency or on call practice. I do acute care general surgery so I do several weeks a year and a bunch of nights a year of being on call. And can you tell us your favorite color. Red. And what is your favorite food. I like the five color

[01:20] And what is your favorite superhero Deadpool and your favorite musical artist. I'm a big country fan so I like Eric Church, Luke Combs, Chris Stableton are probably my top three right now. And what would be your favorite movie. Deadpool.

Career Influence & Mentorship

[01:40] We watched that the night before a Royal College exam. So dress reliever. And can you tell us your favourite organ of the body? The cecum, I guess. Can you tell us the last book you read? Searching for Alaska by John Green.

[02:00] And can you recommend me a TV show? Yeah, I would just recently watched the Drive to Survive documentary now for Formula One racing trip. That was pretty interesting. Nice. Okay, so you passed the quick buy around, so we'll kind of get into our nitty gritty questions.

[02:20] Can you tell us who your biggest influence was career wise? Yeah, I don't know if I had one person who was kind of my biggest influence but I think throughout training, both in undergrad and then in medical school and residency and fellowship, there have been numerous people who

[02:40] You can tell they cared about about theirs, their students or their residents, and they encouraged you encourage me. Not all of them were like warm and fuzzy encouragement there's some demanding encouragement but I think there's the people who, you know we're looking up your best interests who want you to do well. And it's kind of those people who

Memorable Moments During Training

[03:00] are in your mind still and you hear their voices when you're operating or when you're doing stuff, reminding you to do certain things like find the right tissue plane or do certain things to needle or those kind of things. So it's a variety of people throughout. No one person has kind of been my number one mentor. So you mentioned kind of people in your training.

[03:20] Do you have a most memorable moment from your training? I think the moment I found out I passed my exam was definitely I guess that was my training officially ended. So that was that was extremely memorable. I'll never forget that morning when I posted the exam results. I think there's been a couple kind of more clinical

[03:40] clinical memories of certain traumas or certain patients we had or dealt with. The ones I think that stick out are sometimes unfortunate, the ones that stick out are the bad outcomes, but also patients who are admitted for a long time and then eventually get better and get to go home. And that's always really rewarding.

[04:00] memorable when you've worked with a patient for weeks or even months and then you get to see them get discharged home. Yeah, so do you have like a specific recent memorable moment that you can think of? Recently, well, I had a patient on call a couple weeks ago who came in with the perforated gastric ulcer, which is a

Recent Memorable Cases in Surgery

[04:20] terrifying situation have to do with on-call because it's not too colorectal in nature, but it's something that we often get mock oral exams and we talk through it sometimes. It's the first one I'd seen alone in practice and so I recently done one with a colleague a few days before so it was nice to have recently seen

[04:40] I've seen a stomach surgery and now having to do it on my own for the first time was definitely memorable and they did well so far. So that's good. So like every day you go in and you do these surgeries or you deal with patients and lots of people outside the medical world can't

[05:00] put themselves in your shoes and understand what that's like. Is there anything kind of specific that people outside of medicine just don't understand about your job? I think a question we get quite a bit is people don't understand the difference. Like we're not emergency room physicians, we're often in emergency room seeing patients in the side of the

[05:20] surgery. So they'll say, Oh, I was I was in a merge last night. Like, Oh, are you emergency room doctor? Like, no, I'm a surgeon, but we go to emergency labs. That's one thing. The other thing is for colorectal surgery, everyone assumes it stinks like stool. And it does sometimes, but I think most of the time it doesn't because we often give people bowel preps and we're not trying to get into the colon, we're trying to stay out

Misconceptions About Surgery

[05:40] the colon and just resect it so it doesn't stink like poop too much. And another thing would be it seems like on TV shows when you're operating and you like do one tiny slip the patient instantly dies and thankfully that's not the case. Patients don't die super quickly or mistakes or small errors you make in surgery aren't often catastrophic.

[06:00] traffic instantly. So yeah, those are a couple of things. Well, that's good. Those are good that I didn't know. Can you tell us what the absolute best part of your job would be? I love operating. So if we have a good elective operating day in

[06:20] And there, you know, like we play the music in the background and the case is going well and there's a resident or medical student who's really engaged and fun to work with there and everyone's relaxed and having a good time and it's really fun to operate. What song do you normally put on when you operate? I put on the country music so that much to the chagrin and most of the residents.

[06:40] Yeah, I like it. I guess on the other side of that, what would you say is the worst part of your job. I think will paperwork, doing like filling out forms and finishing charts and stuff isn't fun complications, if we do surgeon things don't go well and doing

Best & Worst Aspects of Being a Surgeon

[07:00] It's hard not to take that home with you sometimes. And then also when we have patients who come in and we're assessing to see if they have surgery, especially for colon cancer, sometimes they're unresectable. And so to tell them we can't help them and they're not curable and they have to go to other patients.

[07:20] palliative care and that can be difficult too. I've asked this question to lots of surgeons now and the most popular answer has been paperwork. Yeah. No one likes the paperwork. So I guess in your practice, can you tell us about maybe like the weirdest or

[07:40] thing that's ever happened to you at work. Yeah, we had. It's interesting. It's funny because I thought about the other day there's I did residency in the same place right now work. And so a lot of memories are often tied to location. So I remember a certain bed in the ICU. And when I was on my ICU rotation where we had a patient who came in, I forget even what their their problem

[08:00] almost initially, but they were being kind of rolled they were intubated so they weren't conscious. And so they were being rolled on their side to get their dressings changed and their, their backside changed. And the patient just had explosive diarrhea like all over the nerves who had rolled them over which is definitely gross thing I saw. And then that same patient

[08:20] The patient's wife came to visit at the same time as his girlfriend came to visit and they didn't know that the other one existed and so then they got in a big fight and we shortly had to call security. So that whole patient in the whole corner of the ICU is very memorable every time I walk by.

Unexpected & Unusual Experiences in Surgery

[08:40] That's pretty crazy. Oh my goodness. So this is kind of funny because the next question I'm going to ask you is about your support system and I'm just thinking about this specific patient support system and how they didn't know about the other.

[09:00] Yeah, you tell us about your support system and what they mean to you. Yeah, I think from I say this is true of a lot of my colleagues and people I've talked to. So I kind of a medical support system of of colleagues, and then the non medical support system and I think both are kind of important because it's nice to get away from medicine.

[09:20] And just hang out with people who don't know you as clinically and you just kind of forget about medicine and hang out with them. So I have a good group of friends. I went to high school here in Edmonton. So I have a big group of high school friends who I hang out with still. So that's nice. And then my family, obviously no one in my family is medical, but they're big supporters.

[09:40] group and they kind of know a lot more about the medical side just from me going through it. And then on the medical side, I'm really lucky to have a couple great, well more than a couple, but a bunch of great colleagues who kind of bounce ideas off of and make sure I'm not doing anything crazy. I'm still pretty new. I just finished my first year in practice. So being able to run things

Support System & Work-Life Balance

[10:00] them and make sure I'm not doing dumb things and kind of figuring out how the system works and that kind of stuff is awesome. And then the co-residents I did my chief here with and took my exams with and studied with are awesome because we went through residency together and we studied together and so I often call them for advice and we chat about difficult cases and what we do.

[10:20] So when you were at school, so even before medical school, did you ever imagine yourself living your current life? No. So I remember distinctly, I was talking with my cousin who is one year older than me and we were in high school and we're talking about like what we're going to do when high school is done.

[10:40] And we were talking about accounting or engineering and then we were like, ah, medicine would be interesting and we both said no, it was like way too much, way too much school for that. So I wasn't planning on it. Like it was in the back of my mind in high school, but I thought that's a lot of school so I wasn't too interested and then in undergrad I took a lot of science courses and I was like, okay, this is

[11:00] This is really interesting to some I want to do, but then in medical school I was like well medicines cool but surgery, I don't want to do that long five or seven it seems tough and then I really really like my surgery rotation. So I guess surgery is the one. But then I'm not going to do a fellowship or a master's because I don't want to do all that extra stuff for an academic

[11:20] And then as I went through residencies, I go, I like the academic position and I kind of want to do co-active fellowship. So I ended up doing the master's and the fellowship and the residency and everything. So no, I didn't imagine that. And then being fortunate enough to get a job back in Edmonton where I did my training and where I grew up, you know, as a

Career Expectations vs. Reality

[11:40] Like a dream come true. So I didn't expect this. I'm very happy and lucky. So if you weren't doing your current job, what career do you think you'd most like to do? I think if I could like choose to be talented, something like be a professional ski or professional mountain

[12:00] biker or something outdoors hiker. If I didn't have like professional caliber scale, I think something like park ranger or something outside for sure. Cool. So we're kind of on to our last question here. If you could go back, what advice

[12:20] would you give your younger self or someone considering your career? I think I would say don't be scared off by the length of training. Kind of like I talked about, I never thought I would do any of the things I've done. But as you go through, you kind of realize if that's what you want or if that's what's interesting.

[12:40] It's challenging but it's not it's not such a big barrier that you can't do it so don't be scared off. Also I'd say don't be scared off by people who appear to have it all together and seem way smarter to know everything and be ahead of you because I think a lot of people in medicine, they talk about like a plastic bag.

[13:00] syndrome, we don't feel like you measure up to your colleagues, or I think most of us do. I think the selection process to get to where we are is weeds out to people who actually shouldn't be there and everyone else who's left is qualified. So don't be scared by your awesome colleagues. Just be happy they're there to help you get through. And then I find

Advice for Aspiring Surgeons & Final Thoughts

[13:20] There's a lot of pressure medical school to figure out what specialty you want to do. And I know I was always stressed out by that when I went through. So I think there's a tendency for people to see an awesome preceptor and assume they want to do that specialty even though it might just because they have such a great preceptor and the actual

[13:40] medical specialty might not be great for them. And then on the flip side, you have a terrible preceptor. And so you think that specialty is terrible, but it's actually a great fit for you. It's just hard to separate the preceptor from what you'll clinically end up doing. So I think trying to really, as a medical student, take a step back and say, do I really like this rotation because of

[14:00] Do I really like this rotation because I actually like the medicine we're doing? Or the other way around, do I dislike this rotation because of the preceptor or because of the actual clinical work? And I mean, in a perfect world, you have a great preceptor in the rotation you're on and then it becomes easy, but it can be hard. Then I guess the other thing would be, in medicine we tend to really

[14:20] So don't put too much stock into what other people say about your specialty or the one you're interested in. Like, you talk to anybody about surgery and they'll give you a lot of negative feedback who's not in surgery, but by the same token I can give you a ton of negative feedback about other specialties. So again, don't put too much stock on what other people say. But don't put too much stock into what other people say.

[14:40] listen to people who are in the specialty because they obviously know it best and have been through the training and can give you advice about what to expect and how life after residency is way better, way worse, or about the same as his life during residency, which is important because residency is tough but temporary, but the lifestyle after is what you're really going

[15:00] That's what you have to kind of decide if you can can handle it if that's what you want to do. Well thank you so much Dr. Dykstra for joining us today on Surgery Secrets. It was a pleasure to have you join our series. Thank you. And there you have it. Join us next time for another exclusive look into surgery today. Follow us on LinkedIn for new surgery.

[15:20] secrets episodes and check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For more information on Surgery 101, head to our website, surgery101.org. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.