Shaun Samuels and I were residents together at USC. He was one year ahead of me. On my first IR rotation at the beginning of my second year, he was my “senior” resident. As a junior resident, I was very reliant upon my senior on my very first IR rotation. As a general rule, you rarely worked with the fellows. I scrubbed with attendings on an even more infrequent basis. Suffice to say, my IR experience was deeply influenced and dependent upon my senior resident.
When I started DR residency, I had no idea what IR was all about (even though my own mom had undergone preoperative embolization for a meningioma by Grant Hieshima at UCSF in 1987- that’s a whole other story). I liked DR and that was good enough for me. As a resident, you did your first IR rotation in the second year- it was a two-month block and after one month, you started to take primary IR call (for the biggest trauma center in southern California). Lots of good stories about this, maybe for another time.
Getting to know him over the course of the two-month IR rotation we spent together, it became clear to me that Shaun was a complicated guy: he had a burning obsession for one of his classmates (lots of great stories about this too). He owned and lived in a condo near Chavez ravine. He was an accomplished musician. He was a polymath. Everyone knew Shaun was hardcore IR and was 100% headed for fellowship. He knew way more about vascular intervention and stent grafts than the attendings- this was in 1993! I found out later that his father was a renown vascular surgeon at UCLA who founded the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery. He seemed a lot older than the majority of the residents. He seemed a lot more cynical too.
Side note: Shaun had several patents, the most notable of which was for a stent graft that used a cuff that you injected with a liquid polymer to hold it in place (rather than barbs or hooks). This patent (6007575) was granted in 1997. Interestingly, he wrote this patent with only six references which is pretty remarkable. He had an even earlier patent for a stent-graft in 1995. He wrote both of these patents as a resident. If you want to know what his patent looked like, Google the Endologix Ovation stent-graft device. There was a lot of litigation over a few years related to that device and Shaun’s patent. All of the gory details of the lawsuit may have died with Shaun; I can’t remember enough of what he shared with me other than to say that he kinda got screwed over.
Back to my story: All USC resident ate in the Doctor’s Dining Room (DDR) at LA County. The DDR is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Imagine 1-gallon cans of Sysco tuna in a tepid salad bar. One morning, we were sitting down to breakfast. Shaun asked me what I thought of IR. I had been on the service for one month. I told him I was pretty excited- maybe this is what I wanted to do with my life. He sat back, put down his fork, looked at me skeptically (which is pretty much how he always looked at me) and said, “I don’t think you have the moxie.”
As you know, payback is a bitch. So many years later, when Shaun was admitted at MD Anderson for resection of his melanoma and completion lymphadenectomy, I brought him a six pack of Moxie soda and told him to suck on it.