The Inaugural Post

Reflections on Grit, Gratitude and the Grind of starting up a surgical practice

Hi everyone, welcome to the Iyengar Plastic Surgery page! I’d like to use this space as a virtual forum to share my experiences about new developments in the plastic surgery universe and updates about building a practice back in my hometown! Hope you all enjoy.

A little more on how I got (back) here to Washington. I’ve been away for over 15 years on an epic educational and training odyssey, which ultimately led me back to where the journey began. I spent eight formative years in Providence, RI at Brown University for my undergraduate studies and medical school, which is where I first fell in love with plastic surgery. Through invaluable mentorship and plenty of hard work, I matched at Yale University in New Haven, CT for a six-year plastic and reconstructive surgery residency. This was a grueling period of personal/professional growth and unparalleled camaraderie yielding many lifelong friendships forged in the proverbial fire of surgical residency. To round out my training, I opted for a coveted one-year Hand/Microvascular surgery fellowship at Vanderbilt University and was fortunate to train with some outstanding surgeons within many disciplines including Aesthetic and Breast surgery as well. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed our year in Nashville and have nothing but the fondest memories of our wonderful friends and colleagues there. Southern hospitality is alive and well!

I now work shoulder to shoulder with my dad, Jay Iyengar, MD, who is something of a local legend in the community (he’s too humble to accept any such label); he has cared for over 30,000 patients with often debilitating back and neck pain over the past several decades. It is with a sense of immense gratitude and responsibility that I now return to the community that molded me to serve as a plastic surgeon. My scope of training is broad and doesn’t easily fit into a particular box; plastic surgeons pride themselves on operating head to toe, treating both young and elderly patients and collaborating with essentially every other specialty in medicine.

As an illustration of this, just over the past few weeks, I have taken care of a complex lip laceration for a 3-year-old girl bitten by a neighbor’s dog, numerous breast reconstruction cases for cancer patients, surgical decompressions for carpal/cubital tunnel syndrome, thumb arthritis and a variety of aesthetic consults for abdominal and breast contouring post-pregnancy, facial rejuvenation and nasal deformities; another gentleman recently suffered a nerve injury to his index finger while working with a chainsaw necessitating a nerve graft to reconstruct the defect. Never a dull moment! Please follow along as I explore topics interesting to both my patients and me as Iyengar Plastic Surgery continues to grow. That’s all for now folks.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy holiday season,

Raj Iyengar, M.D.