YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Sarel Vorster

lines on the record: 61
first: 2019-12-23
most recent: 2019-12-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“his brain from the front to the back, and of course I'm thinking well this is amazing the person's talking to me but this is just going to end very suddenly and people were saying well everybody's done their thing and inserted their catheters and so on and we should take him to the scandal and I was sort of thinking well is this going to be beneficial but anyway the patient's completely lucid and in fact he tells me he's been shot twice and I said well I only see one bullet hole but I thought maybe he's confused anyway we go down to the scanner we do the scan and of course he was shot twice and as it happened he was a drug related issue and he was shot with special bullets at a hollow tips that actually hit the skull and stopped so he was shot once in the front of the skull and once in the back because he ducked and then he was shot again so the point of the story is we discharged him later the same day so he was shot twice in the head and survived it so you just never know what you're getting”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe I can tell you a couple of anecdotes that really emphasizes that I was called down to an emergency room once and somebody had been shot in the head in the face, basically. I wasn't quite sure of the circumstances, but in any event, there's no time to think about all that. And here's a person, and you know we have these teams that descend on you when you have a serious injury. So I'm the person at the head of the bed holding the patient's head in a midline position and some other people are putting in various IVs and catheters and all these kinds of things, a lot of activity. And the patient's talking to me, I'm holding his head with both my hands, and my fingers at the back of his head, I'm feeling there's something bleeding or something's not right in the back of his head, and he has a small opening on his face just next to his nose on his cheek where he had apparently been shot. I assume that what I'm feeling with my fingers at the back is that the bullet went through.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you started with an example of something as you said where it was you almost knew ahead of time. There's a tumor, it has to come out. If it comes out successfully, they're going to live a lot longer. If not, have a short life I imagine that the other side of that is there are lots of situations where it's not so black and white. So walk through that decision process.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With experience, sometimes the decision to do surgeries fairly simple, so I know that the tumor has to come out or the bleeding has to be stopped, but what's not simple, of course, is to get everybody that's involved on the same page because people want to know this is the brain, as you said. So people want to know what are the risks, what could happen, what would happen if we do nothing, what are the expectations. And so quite a bit of time goes into not really even making the decision sometimes a decision has already been made, but getting everybody on the same page and getting them to a point where they understand the risks and the benefits and the alternatives, you know, there's a lot of things that have to go. So a lot of explaining, a lot of answering questions and so forth. And then inevitably at some point it gets to, well, this is what I recommend. And people tend to trust, you know, they expect a neurosurgeon to be an expert. And so they often, you can't expect.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, of course, we do neurological examinations. We check peoples and strength and all of these things. And then finally imaging. Imaging is very important to us because, of course, you can't see the brain from the outside or the spinal cord. So a lot of CT scans, MRIs, and other types of tests we do. So then there's a lot of reviewing of the imaging. And imaging has become so complex nowadays. It's not just a picture. There's different MRI techniques that show you different things, the blood vessels or the nerves or even the nerve tracts nowadays. We spend a lot of time evaluating those and then of course explaining all of that to the family and to the patient.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or they're badly injured so one needs to find the context of the situation first so that's where i start and then of course from there on it goes to finding out exactly what it was that happened because often these things are very unpredictable you know somebody just woke up with a headache or they discovered their arm doesn't move or very shocking things they had a seizure maybe or something so the first question is often you know was this”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you asked that way because it really does start right in the beginning, you know, when somebody gets referred to me or I meet somebody through the emergency department. And there's that first moment where you see a neurosurgeon, you know, and that's not something many people have done. And I try to remind myself of that. Just on a side note, my wife once said to me, have you noticed how afraid people are when they come to see you? And I said, really? Wow, I thought I was quite nice. She says, now you're very nice as surgeons go. Have you ever thought what it feels like to go and see a neurosurgeon? I said, well, you know, I'm kind of nervous getting a flu shot, so that's the first thing. So I spend the initial time, you know, getting to know people. I like asking them where they're from and getting to meet their family. There's usually a bunch of people in the room because, you know, you're going to see the neurosurgeon now. And so I take time meeting everybody and finding out who this person is because, you know, sometimes I meet somebody and they're incapable or they're in a”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're going to walk through that exercise of the whole process of someone coming to surgery and just see what comes of it in terms of parallels and decision-making processes. So I'm not sure where to start, but when you think about ultimately you have a patient in surgery, where does that process start?”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first impression was I didn't realize how little I knew about all the details of business and how complex business had become, but what also struck me was that ultimately these are humans making decisions and pushing buttons and coming up with policies and that it really is a human exercise.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a long time a wise man told me years ago if you're interested in other things, you should wait until you're 50. I don't know where he got the 50. But I was 50 when I went to business school and the reason was I noticed that there were a lot of systemic changes in medicine. The processes, the payment system, just everything about it became more complex and I was interested to learn what the business aspects might be of all that.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went to medical school, it was apparent to me from the first day that there were medical doctors and surgical doctors, so I felt naturally drawn to the surgeons and decisiveness of it, and then as I progressed through the field, initially I didn't even know what neurosurgeons did, but as I learned more and had more experience, I realized neurosurgery is the ultimate for me as I thought the brain was just the ultimate and I wanted to be involved in that.”
2019-12-23 · Capital Allocators · Dr. Sarel Vorster – Conducting Brain Surgery (Capital Allocators, EP.117) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source