On any given day, West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (WVSOM) graduate Heather Phillips, D.O., is responsible for anesthetizing pediatric patients who may range from 600-gram newborns to 500-pound teenagers. Her tasks also include preoperative evaluations and discussions with anxious parents, and procedures such as placing IVs, intubations, epidurals and regional blocks.
“Giving anesthesia does not only mean ‘putting someone to sleep.’ It means keeping them alive and maintaining hemodynamic stability while keeping them asleep,” she said. “I also manage acute or chronic pain, mainly with pharmacologic measures, once surgery is complete.”
Phillips has worked for 15 years as an attending pediatric anesthesiologist at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville, Tenn. She and her team of certified registered nurse anesthetists provide anesthesia for procedures such as brain tumor excision, appendectomy and tonsillectomy, often in three different operating rooms simultaneously.
Phillips said the team care model used by her hospital is built on trust.
“A lot of anesthesiologists will say that our days are spent putting out fires. This means a day spent assisting with things that have the potential to become critical events. For example, intubating a difficult airway, obtaining IV access in a severely dehydrated and critically ill baby or directing which vasopressors to infuse to improve cardiac output. We collaborate with surgeons, critical care physicians and other specialists to optimize our patients before coming to the OR, and we also manage in and out of OR resuscitations, though that is not a common occurrence,” she said.
After graduating from WVSOM in 2003, Phillips completed an anesthesiology residency in 2007 and a pediatric anesthesiology fellowship in 2008 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But she didn’t always want to be an anesthesiologist.
“Prior to med school, I thought I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but while on an obstetrics rotation as a third-year student, we spent some time observing in the operating room on the anesthesia side,” she said. “I found myself more interested in what the anesthesiologist was doing than what was happening with the surgery. I was intrigued by this specialty that required a command of physiology, pharmacology, disease processes and pathology, critical thinking and procedural skills. Everything else quickly paled in comparison.”
Throughout its history, WVSOM has placed an emphasis on educating physicians to enter primary care specialties, but graduates are qualified to enter any specialty — whether someone wants to be a hometown family medicine doctor or find their calling in a subspecialty.
Phillips said she never felt limited at WVSOM regarding specialty options. She was a chief resident at the University of Michigan — one of the most competitive anesthesia programs in the country, Phillips said — in her senior year of residency.
She decided to pursue a career in anesthesiology rather than a primary care specialty because it was what fascinated and challenged her.
“I knew my days would never be mundane, and I could use both critical thinking and procedural skills daily. There’s a sense of urgency in the OR that’s missing from nonsurgical specialties. You have a few minutes, at most, to fix an issue before permanent damage or death can result. I thrive in that type of atmosphere,” she said.
While most days in the operating room are predictable, they are never boring, Phillips said. She added that being able to get a child who is not expected to survive surgery through the operation is an indescribable feeling and the most rewarding part of her job.
She recounted a recent surgery on a young adolescent whose diagnosis meant a potentially risky procedure. Before the operation, Phillips told the patient that she would do everything in her power to bring him back to his family. After the surgery went well and the patient began waking up, his words to her stood out.
“He grabbed my hand and with tears in his eyes said, ‘Thank you so much, doctor. You did it.’ It made me tear up in the moment, and then again when I told his dad what he had said, and his dad asked if he could give me a hug. There is no better reward than a hug from a grateful parent,” Phillips said. “Some days I actually get to save a child’s life, and that’s the coolest thing ever.”