Hollywood Plastic Surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan
Hollywood plastic surgeon to the stars, Dr. Frank Ryan, died this last week in a single car accident that was apparently the result of texting while driving. A while ago I had commented on some of his surgeries on Heidi Montag. He was a good surgeon involved with a, to put it mildly, unstable patient in Heidi Montag. And I think that even he, in the end, had told her no more, especially with respect to her breast augmentation. He was a board certified plastic surgeon, a UCLA graduate like me and did good work. There are too many surgeons out there who don’t do good work. There are the many pretenders, the faux plastic surgeons, these are the get-rich-quick surgeons who are entering the profession in droves because there is no reimbursement in conventional medicine. Dr. Ryan was one of the doctors inside plastic surgery doing his best work for his patients.
This is not necessarily a eulogy to Dr. Ryan but more of a commentary on the tragedy of his death. All of our lives are becoming much more complicated. Because of the nature of business today, plastic surgeons are spending a great deal of time on their websites their blogs their Facebook or Twitter and who knows what else will be coming down the road. If the news reports are true, Dr. Ryan’s death was caused by his tweeting while driving on a fairly dangerous road. Once we become addicted to our electronic media they are a constant part of our lives. Multitasking is also something that many of us feel obligated to do because there just isn’t enough time in the day. This combination of factors, keeping up with his twitter, multitasking and being distracted seems to have led to his untimely death. There are several things that we can take away from this tragedy first and most obvious texting while driving kills. There was a ubiquitous sign poster in the 1960s that said speed kills. This was obviously referring to the drug not velocity. Nowadays texting kills. A friend of mine was almost killed recently when he narrowly averted a head-on collision because a girl in the opposite lane was texting while driving 65 miles per hour on a two-lane highway, didn’t have a clue, and then lost control of her car. She hit the side of his car, spun out and ended up in the hospital, lucky to be alive. She said, “I wasn’t texting, I was reading a text,” which, of course, is texting. Don’t text and drive, it’s just that simple.
The other thing that this incident does is it gives us pause for reflection about how complicated our lives have become. Are we spending more time with our computers, laptops and iPhone’s then we are with the people we love. Are we tweeting, facebooking and texting more than talking and sitting with these people? The pace of life seems to accelerate every year just a little bit. Like the lobster in the stew pot, we don’t even know we are being boiled until it’s too late. This may be a good time to reevaluate all our relationships with our machines, how dangerous they are at times and how much of our lives they consume. Life is short and you never know when your number is going to come up, take time while you still have a chance to enjoy it. The second to last of Frank Ryan’s tweets was, “After 25 years of driving by, I finally hiked to the top of the giant sand dune on the pch west of Malibu. Much harder than it looks! Whew!”
Dr. Frank Ryan's last tweet: "Border collie jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune."
Then he posted a picture of his dog at the top of the sand dune while driving away. It is a sad irony that it would be the high-tech sharing of a moment he stole away from his hectic schedule to enjoy actually living, that would end his life.
