In honor of Raj Pruthi, MD
When Raj Pruthi was 11 years old, he was quite the baseball player and during one hot streak, when a reporter asked him which Major League team he wanted to pitch for, he responded, “I don’t want to be a pitcher; I want to be a heart surgeon.”
Close. Dr. Raj Pruthi is now one of the most well-respected and beloved surgeons in the country and a pioneer in a new robotic surgical technique to treat bladder cancer patients. He wrote the procedures on this new procedure, with UNC’s Dr. Eric Wallen, that surgeons around the world use. And Dr. Pruthi has written chapters for text books on how to use less invasive robotics for all urologic surgeries, including prostate cancer.
But what really drives him is seeing patients get well.
“Everyone is someone’s son or daughter or wife or father,” Dr. Pruthi says. “So, to me, everyone is a VIP. Everyone is the same in the surgical room. And this goes for all surgeons; there’s only one gear—to do it all the best you can. I love that.”
He knows, due to their diagnoses, that his patients’ lives have changed forever.
“But my goal is for their lives to change as little as possible,” he says. “I tell my patients that my goal is that, 20 years form now, they’ll be enjoying life and won’t even remember my name. I want their cancer surgeries to be little detours along the way.”