written By Kane Webb
Photos by Mickie Winters
Reprinted with permission from Louisville Magazine
A Cut Above
Following Dr. Russ Williams through a day of surgeries is exhausting,
shocking, occasionally nauseating, uplifting, awe-inspiring . . . and did we
mention exhausting?
R
ussell A. Williams, M.D., says “Hey” and “Follow me” in the
same breath — “Heyfollowme” — and I spring from my seat
in the second-floor lobby of the Rudd Heart and Lung Center
at Jewish Hospital downtown and walk-jog behind him to catch up.
In an instant he’s down the hall, speed-passing doctors and
nurses like an ambulance blowing past traffic — “How’s it going?”;
“Mornin’”; “He’s with me” — through the doctors’ lounge, past a
foursome of wall-mounted televisions, past long-faced medical
students hunched over coffee and cell phones, and finally into the
men’s locker room.
“You look like a medium,” he says, handing me a powder-blue
pajama-like top and bottom with white trim around the trademark
“V” neck. Scrubs. “You can use my locker.”
I should have worn tennis shoes. Instead I’ve got boots on. And I
haven’t eaten yet. And it’s 7:20 on a cold, see-your-breath morning
in late October, and the day ahead looks intimidating: five surgeries.
At least. Starting in 25 minutes.
7:45 a.m.
Thursday, Oct. 24, Jewish Hospital
Operating Room 6
The procedure is called a “laparoscopic-assisted colectomy.” In English, that means the patient, a woman in her 60s, will have most of
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her colon removed. She’s got cancer. Before I enter the OR, looking
either like everybody els H܈