An interview with Chih-Ta Lin, the doctor who saved my life
Written by: Jef Otte, clinical communications manager at Intermountain Health
As a clinical communications manager, I get to talk to a lot of caregivers who are doing extraordinary, life-saving work. But it’s not that often I get to talk to the doctor who saved my own life.
In early February, I was in a bicycle crash that crushed my helmet and fractured my skull in three places. A runner found me and called an ambulance, and the ambulance took me to Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, Colorado. Around midnight, my condition took a turn for the worse. Neurosurgeon Chih-Ta Lin, MD, was on call that night.
Within the hour, he performed a procedure he’s done dozens of times – one I needed to survive. A few months later, he was kind enough to chat with me about how he became a neurosurgeon, what he remembers about that night, and why neurosurgery is really a team sport.
Did you always know you wanted to be a neurosurgeon?
No, I was going to be a primary care doc, but I found I actually enjoyed anatomy more than I thought I would. It was straightforward. This is a liver, and this is what happens when the liver goes wrong, and this is how you fix it. I was on track to be a trauma surgeon, and I think the appeal was that you’re the ultimate generalist. You do everything.
Then one day I met a neurosurgeon, and he said, you should come to my OR and see what we do. And I said, okay, sure. He was doing a spine surgery, and I was immediately hooked. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life. And, you know, he became one of my mentors and the rest is history.
What was it about that first surgery you thought was so cool?
It was a degenerative lumbar fusion case, and so the patient was suffering from severe pain in their back and legs. We were putting in screws and rods to pull the back straight and then doing a decompression, removing bone to free up the nerves and resolve pain down the legs. It was almost binary. You have a broken back, and now we’re putting it back together, and it’s fixed when we’re done. It felt very rewarding.
You of course work at combined neurosurgery and spine clinic now. Do you still do a lot of spine work?
Spine is a lot of what I do, but also a lot of cranial tumors, so it’s probably about 50/50 spine and brain. And of course I do trauma.
Right. When you took care of me, I came in as a trauma case.
Exactly.
What do you remember about that night?
I was a busy call week. We had someone else who had very similar injuries to yours the night before, believe it or not. You came from the ER, and your first image was pretty benign. Nothing I would be too worried about.
But we have standard protocols where we always repeat imaging of the brain six hours later, and I remember pulling up your six-hour scan and being in disbelief at what I was looking at, because there was such a dramatic change. It was late in the evening, and I got in my car and called the team, because I didn’t think you would get through the night without surgery to get the blood out of your head.
I remember your wife looking pulled together but very scared. And I remember seeing you and you were not looking great. You were conscious but not really aware of what was happening. I pulled your wife aside to explain what was going on and what I felt we needed to do, and she agreed. We got you into the operating room within an hour of when I saw that scan.
I don’t remember anything, but my partner remarked later she was astonished by how fast the whole team was suddenly there.
We don’t mess around. But the reality is things can change. We had to do it to keep you alive. That’s really what it comes down to. If you dilly-dally too long, that’s how people die very quickly.
So we took you to the OR and the surgery went really well. We got the blood off very quickly, placed the bone and closed you up, and you were much better afterwards.
It’s interesting to think an injury like the one I had is, on the one hand, very grave and life-threatening, but on the other hand a pretty routine fix. Like you had another one the night before.
I mean it’s neurosurgery, but it’s not advanced neurosurgery. Every time you do it, the stakes are high. You have to move quickly. It’s almost like your body just does it and you don’t have to think about it. But yeah, that’s your story, or at least my involvement with your story.
Well, I sure do appreciate your involvement.
And you’re welcome. But really it’s the whole team. I can’t do all that myself. Neurosurgery is a team sport. It’s the anesthesia that’s ready to go. It’s the nursing that knows when something’s not right. It’s everyone that came in for you.
And the many teams that cared for me afterward. It’s not like I just, you know, got my head stapled back together and walked out of the hospital.
That’s exactly right.
I’m really grateful. And it’s given me a new appreciation for what I do, communicating with people in jobs like yours, because those are all the people who showed up and cared for me.
I've worked for many hospital systems, and I've been very impressed with this particular hospital - the physicians, the PAs, all the staff. Everyone here really cares about doing the right thing. It’s actually been very refreshing to work for Good Samaritan, so I’m glad you were the recipient of that.
