[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css_animation=”fadeIn”]\u201cYou are kidding me?\u00a0 You want to become a doctor?\u00a0 You can\u2019t stand the sight of blood.\u201d\u00a0 That was my Mom\u2019s reaction to my decision to go into medicine.\u00a0 Things did kind of gross me out when I was a kid.\u00a0 Kind of ironic.\u00a0 When I got into medical school (Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas), I thought initially that I would become a family physician and go back to Colorado and be a small town Doc.\u00a0 But once I started seeing patients in medical school, I soon realized that western medicine, in a large part amounted to disease management.\u00a0 Growing up in a family of engineers, I liked to fix things.\u00a0 That is where surgery came in.\u00a0 And I was actually pretty good at it.\u00a0 I was scared the first day of cadaver lab.\u00a0 The smell was horrible.\u00a0 But all that passed after the first day.\u00a0 I was fascinated with the anatomy and when I got to surgery I saw some of the most amazing things.<\/p>\n
Baylor was a trauma center and we saw a lot of trauma, including gunshot and knife wounds.\u00a0 My first night on call a guy had been shot through the heart.\u00a0 We did open heart surgery on him right in the ER and saved his life.\u00a0 Now that was pretty cool!<\/p>\n
Medical students \u201crotate\u201d or spend a couple of months in each of the core medical specialties, such as internal medicine, general surgery, OB\/GYN, pediatrics, etc.\u00a0 As a medical student, I considered all the different surgical specialties.\u00a0 After looking at the different surgical specialties, I thought I wanted to become an Ear, Nose & Throat surgeon.\u00a0 I had left my OB\/GYN rotation fairly late in medical school because I did not think I was interested in this specialty.\u00a0 I knew they did not have a life outside of medicine, and surgeons did not have a lot of respect for the average OB\/GYN as a surgeon.\u00a0 OB\/GYN can be a lot of primary care and delivering babies, and as a result, many OB\/GYNs do not do much surgery and thus are not very experienced surgeons.<\/p>\n
Dr. Franklin changed my perception of this in many ways.\u00a0\u00a0 First of all, what an amazing human being.\u00a0 In the midst of an academic medical center full of big egos and a rush to see as many patients as possible in a day, I found this gentle compassionate man helping women in pain get their lives back.\u00a0 He was also an amazing surgeon.\u00a0 Not like the typical gynecologist, he was an extremely skilled surgeon.\u00a0 He was also a teacher, for his patients as well as for the medical students and residents.\u00a0 He would help women understand what was going on in their bodies and educate them on this disease called endometriosis.\u00a0 He saw patients from all over Texas and would send patients back to their hometown doctors armed with this newfound understanding of their disease to educate their doctors!<\/p>\n
He was a true mentor for me, for he embodied my vision of what a physician should be.\u00a0 A skilled surgeon with a unique skill set, that treats his patients with the care and compassion that all humans deserve and in the process provides healing where others have not been successful.\u00a0 He told me to go to the residency OB\/GYN training program in Wichita, Kansas if I wanted to go into this field.\u00a0 He related that it may not be the most famous program in the country, but it was the best program in the country.\u00a0 He was right – and after being accepted, I was off to start learning my skill set required to treat endometriosis and pelvic pain.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Learn how Dr. Cook’s medical training with Dr. Franklin inspired him to become an endometriosis specialist and skilled surgeon, helping women in pain get their lives back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":16139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,91],"tags":[174],"class_list":["post-15598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dr-andrew-cook","category-dr-cook","tag-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vitalhealth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}