Proctor arrives in Miami as a new hire, a veteran surgeon returning to the front lines of emergency medicine after years of cushy tushy practice in Baltimore (he says he specialized in hemorrhoid removal).
A veteran surgeon has seen thousands of patients, and can apply the pattern recognition and judgment — the quality — that has been developed over a lifetime to ever more complex cases.
The veteran eye surgeon had spent eight years developing an innovative lens to correct both cataracts and farsightedness.
He is a decorated military veteran, a trained surgeon, a medical professor, and a sheriff's deputy.
(The other happy Senate surprise for the Democrats is Arizona, where the party somehow came up with a Hispanic physician who is a disabled Vietnam veteran and former surgeon general for the Bush administration, as well as the hero of several dramatic rescues, during one of which he shot a deranged suspected murderer.
In Arizona the Democrats are fielding a strong candidate in Richard Carmona, a decorated veteran, Latino and former surgeon-general under George W. Bush.
Mr. Flake will run against Richard H. Carmona, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former United States surgeon general who is the Democrats' best chance of having a senator from the state for the first time since 1995.
Despite the removal of the breathing machine, a handful of veteran trauma physicians and orthopedic surgeons interviewed on Friday said the governor was entering a phase of recovery that was riddled with potential hazards common to those who have sustained similar injuries.
John Bini, a trauma surgeon and a veteran of homemade-bomb injuries from two previous deployments in Iraq, immediately evacuated the operating room.
But some surgeons argued that the veterans study reflected a narrow demographic and that patients with locking or other "mechanical" symptoms could still benefit.
