“One day, that’s going to be me,” Sandip Saha, MD ’10, remembers thinking of a pivotal moment that ignited the earliest beginnings of his medical career. He was 10 years old, standing in the cafeteria of Toronto General Hospital at 2:00 am with his mother, searching for a snack while awaiting crucial news of his father. The cafeteria was closed but the light from all the vending machines illuminated a solitary surgeon, still in surgical cap and mask, exhausted and asleep in a seat.
That intense, inspiring visual came at a critical time. Dr. Saha’s father had suffered a heart attack and fallen down the stairs at his home in the suburbs of Toronto. His young son had witnessed it all, including the arrival of the EMTs who took the whole family to the hospital, where Mr. Saha received a quadruple bypass. “I remember, afterwards, my mom at home trying to understand everything that was happening by reading encyclopedias,” says Dr. Saha. “And I started reading them too.”
His mom wasn’t from a medical background and his father was hearing-impaired, but Dr. Saha recalls the way his father’s doctors talked to both parents and took care to explain everything. It stuck with him and he began to understand medicine is more than a science, it’s about connecting and helping people. When his mom bought him an anatomy coloring book, he realized as early as sixth grade, that although he loved art at school, it was time to become serious about a path to medicine.
The Art of Medicine
In 2006, after an undergraduate degree at York University, his path took Dr. Saha to the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC) on the island of Sint Maarten. In a competitive landscape of Canadian medical schools, Dr. Saha learned of the school from a blog and became enthusiastic about the idea of studying there. “The Tom Hanks movie Castaway had just come out and I was obsessed by the jungle, but the island had a lot of clubs and beaches, and as I wasn’t into that scene, I thought it would be a good environment to keep me focused on the library,” he jokes.
After AUC, Dr. Saha completed his internal medicine residency at Wayne State University and then pursued pulmonary and critical care fellowships at Michigan State University. With his interest in advanced cases, he then garnered a fellowship in interventional pulmonology at Yale University School of Medicine. It was here he discovered his calling and where he first learned about the crucial need for more interventional pulmonologists, a specialty that would allow him to combine both his artistic temperament with refined surgical skills. “It’s the right mix of everything. I like working with my hands, being precise and methodical and thinking visually,” he explains. “The lungs are a dynamic, 3D space. You’re using brushes, needles, cryo probes and robotic tools. And doing things that help us all take general pulmonology to the next level.”
Today Dr. Saha is head of the Interventional Pulmonology Department at Buffalo General Medical Center, Buffalo, New York where he’s built his team from the ground up designing workflows, collaborating with anesthesiology colleagues and helping train endoscopy nurses. Amid everything he’s achieved, he still shows glimmers of his artistic path. He appeared as an extra in DC Comics’ “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," and always wears a Superman T-shirt when on call at the hospital.
“Superman is on call,” he laughs. “It helps patients feel more comfortable. They know I care.”
