The patient had a proximal humerus fracture and scapular fractures. He had no scapular spine. He had no deltoid. Eighty per cent of his trapezius was gone.

Mohammad Jomaa searched the literature and found nothing. Not in the shoulder literature, not even in the sarcoma literature. There was no described solution because nobody had described the problem.

So he invented one. And he is emphatic that every solution he has invented since rests entirely on the basics he was taught during his fellowship.

Dr Mohammad Jomaa now leads a shoulder and thoracic outlet unit in Beirut. In this conversation with Kenneth Cutbush, he traces a path that began with a last-minute decision. In Lebanese high school he took the pathway built entirely on mathematics and physics, with no biology at all, and excelled at it. His whole extended family expected engineering. In the summer between school and university he changed his mind and chose medicine instead.

He describes orthopaedic training in Lebanon in terms that are hard to process from Australia. It is the most competitive program in the Lebanese University, taken by roughly the top twenty per cent of the cohort. He ranked fourteenth out of a hundred. Residents rotate through ten different hospitals across five years, with ten different mentors. And the hours: 24-hour shifts, 48-hour shifts, 72-hour shifts. As he puts it, the hospital is the first home and your mother's house is the second.

He also talks about the IELTS exam, where he scraped the required seven in the writing section. A detail worth holding onto, because he now writes publications, and writes them well.

There is a warm section on mentorship, and on the difference between a mentor and a boss: someone who talks to you as if you are at his level, explains things simply, and corrects your bad ideas without ever telling you they were stupid.

Chapters

  • 00:00 A patient with no scapular spine and no deltoid
  • 00:52 Welcome. From Brisbane back to Beirut
  • 02:36 Leading a shoulder and thoracic outlet unit
  • 03:59 The high school pathway with no biology at all
  • 04:31 A last-minute switch from engineering to medicine
  • 06:50 What his family made of it
  • 07:09 "By fixing shoulders, we're fixing lives"
  • 08:05 Why shoulder decision-making is the most interesting in medicine
  • 08:24 The IELTS exam, and barely passing the writing section
  • 09:45 Why orthopaedics
  • 11:02 Swapping medicine rotations for surgical ones
  • 12:49 Why he wanted to see the pathology and fix it
  • 13:59 Getting into orthopaedic training in Lebanon
  • 16:02 Ranking fourteenth out of a hundred
  • 18:07 Ten hospitals, ten mentors, five years
  • 19:12 The year that introduced him to advanced arthroscopy
  • 19:49 24, 48 and 72-hour shifts
  • 21:09 How much you sleep across four days on call
  • 26:45 Finding the Brisbane fellowship online
  • 31:21 What a fellowship director is actually looking for
  • 32:32 His mentor, and what makes a mentor rather than a boss
  • 33:59 Correcting an idea without calling it stupid
  • 36:39 Tendon transfers, and what the fellowship made possible
  • 45:25 Why shoulder patients come back, and spine patients don't