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Daniel N. Driscoll, MD, FACS, Plastic Surgeon, Shriners Children's Boston: I am Dan Driscoll. I am a plastic surgeon here at Shriners Children's Boston. I started out in college working in operating rooms, as part of housekeeping. Did work as a scrub technician. I always gravitated toward the surgical field. I was training in general surgery; got exposure to plastic surgery during that period of time and really fell in love with it. I hadn't really known a lot about what was available here, but soon came to love it right away after I started. We take a look at a brand new look at the child after the burns have been healed. A lot of non-operative things can be done. We work with the therapists, we work with the general surgeons, we work with the families and see what's bothering the child the most. We're doing a lot more work with lasers and then there's innovations in terms of skin substitutes, a lot of innovations in the field of plastic surgery and burn surgery that have made our job easier and easier on the patients. You try to make a bond with the patient and the family to kind of have them understand that you're there for them, you're an advocate for them and that you're going to try to help whatever we can do. But you also have to give some reasonable expectations. So we can't wave a magic wand and make the scars go away but we can make them better. We can make their symptoms of itching better. Shriners has opened their doors to them, and then we can try to assess the problem and then figure things out, what we can do for them. I would have to say that at least 50% of my patients are international. When the problems are much more complex, we often get a Shriners approval to bring them here and do some of the more complex stuff here in the Boston area. When we can't take care of them there, we can take care of them here. And there's nothing more rewarding that.
