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So now it's also at the mercy of amniotic fluid, which is that caustic fluid that gets more caustic over time, which is why fetal surgery for spina bifida makes a difference. And the entire brain is on the outside of the skull and it's kind of inverted. I'm right there with them the whole time - my niece, who I've known since she was a baby, my children walked in her wedding - and there's this encephalocele. called me one day after being pregnant for a few weeks to say, 'I'm with the OB, we've just done our 13-week ultrasound and they say that there's a problem with the brain and they say that I need to come see you, Uncle Jay.' And we get her into the fetal clinic, we do the ultrasound. I will tell you a story about my niece and my niece has allowed me to talk about this. Wade will impact patients whose fetuses have neurological defects I've experienced it as a parent, and I've experienced it as a surgeon." But that degree of gratitude - I mean, I've experienced it as a patient. It's a lot of hours for the residents and for us in the field. "I will always pull that file out and just flip through it and just think, 'This is why we do what we do,'" he says. He says he has a big book of photos and mementos from his patients that he pulls out whenever he needs to be lifted up or grounded. Wellons reflects on his experiences as a pediatric surgeon in the memoir, All That Moves Us. "That was the beginning of when I realized that I may be pivoting from a great career in family medicine, which would've been very rewarding, into an entirely different career." "I remember just spending hours dissecting that out and just being absolutely entranced by it. When he first went to medical school, he envisioned himself as a small-town family medicine doctor, who might "occasionally get paid in tomatoes and chickens." But a gross anatomy lab where he learned about the spinal cord and the nerves of the brachial plexus changed his path. Wellons, who's from south Mississippi, says he didn't set out to become a pediatric surgeon. "We use our magnifying loupes, these surgical loupes, which are magnifying glasses that we wear, and then we have a headlight on so that we can see what we're doing." "Depending on the size of the fetus, can be really small, three grains of rice," Wellons says. He's operated on various parts of the pediatric central nervous system, including performing spine surgery on an in-utero fetus to correct spina bifida. Pediatric neurosurgeon Jay Wellons regularly feels the exhilaration of saving a child from near certain death - and sometimes the anguish of failing to prevent it.