The Patients We Never Forget — Drs. Beaty, LaVelle & Calandruccio (Part 2)

Ask three surgeons with more than a century of combined experience which patient they’ll never forget, and none of them reaches for the hardest case or the biggest save.

Dr. James Calandruccio remembers a two-year-old who went under a riding lawnmower and lost an arm above the elbow. He put it back on. What he thinks about now is the pencil marks on a door jamb, made every time that boy came back, and what the boy asked him the last time he walked out of the room.

He also remembers a man who caught his arm in a printing press, told him to call a colleague if he couldn’t fix it, and then challenged him to a round of golf a couple of years later. Dr. Calandruccio had to decline, for a reason that will make sense when you hear it.

Dr. James Beaty remembers a day that started at 7:30 in the morning and ended at one the next, separating conjoined twins at Le Bonheur with every surgical service in the room.

In part two of this conversation, these three also look forward: the robots and technology reshaping orthopaedics, why the thing dismissed as heresy today becomes the standard of care tomorrow, and what they hope a Campbell Clinic surgeon a hundred years from now still knows about the people who came before.

This is part two of a two-part conversation. Start with part one, where they go back to Dr. Willis Campbell himself and the old guard who trained them.