A Surgeon's Gift

“A teacher once said to me, ‘Surgery is like Christmas every day; you get to open it up and see what’s inside,’ ” Diane Ogren says of her chosen field.
Ogren has been practicing at St. Paul Surgeons Ltd. in St. Paul and Maplewood since returning to her native Minnesota twelve years ago. She went to the University of Nebraska to complete a degree in biomedical engineering, but ended up liking only her biology classes, so she went to medical school and fell in love with surgery after seeing her first anatomy. She then completed her surgical residency at Oregon Health Science University.

Ogren does all types of surgery, including endocrine and thyroid treatments, but her main focus has become breast cancer. She is most often involved in surgical treatment and helps patients coordinate radiation treatments. She sees three to six new breast cancer patients per week and finds it rewarding to follow patients through treatment and recovery.

To advance cancer treatment, Ogren uses MammoSite technology. First used five years ago in Detroit, MammoSite involves Ogren implanting a catheter with a balloon attached into the lumpectomy site in the breast and then working with a radiation oncologist to focus the radiation treatment only on the lumpectomy site, not the entire breast. “The goal is to minimize treatment,” she says. With MammoSite, patients complete fewer treatments because doses of radiation are more concentrated to the cancer site. Ogren says the treatment procedure is fairly uncommon—fewer than 25 percent of her patients are right for MammoSite because due to technical factors, lymph nodes cannot be involved in the procedure.

Most weeks, Ogren is in the operating room four days a week. She admits the work can be emotionally draining, but finds that “there’s something very gratifying in opening someone up and fixing them.” And, as she says, “We go into surgery because we like
to operate.”