Operating Room Artist

David Dugue, CST ’15, MED ’21, remembers the dedication his single mother, Margaret Cesarius, put into her job as a nurse taking care of surgery patients at Franklin Hospital on Long Island, New York.

“She’d work insane hours,” Dugue recalled, leaving his maternal aunt and grandmother with “pretty involved hands” in raising him and his sister.

The women in Dugue’s life exposed him to a little bit of everything in his adolescence: football and clarinet, basketball and piano, arts and crafts. During one stretch they imposed a requirement to read one book every week.

But tragedy struck when Dugue’s aunt, Marie Lourdes Cesarius, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. At first, helping to care for her during her illness helped foster a burgeoning interest in healthcare for Dugue, also inspired by his mother’s vocation. But his aunt’s passing in middle school shook his resolve in a way that resonated all the way to his pre-med undergraduate work at Temple.

“A lot of my desire to go into medicine was to help her,” Dugue says. “But, at the same time, my motivation also wavered when she passed away.”

Inspiration strikes

In college Dugue felt stagnant. His grades at Temple were “okay,” but he wasn’t sure they were adequate for admission to medical school. Instead, he pursued a master’s degree in biology at Drexel University, figuring he’d follow a talent for research into pharmaceutical development.

Then, something changed. Dugue realized he disliked spending so much time inside of a laboratory. His desire to directly interact with and help people was rekindled, and with it came a new determination. He doubled down on his academics, took the MCATs, and went back to Temple to pursue his medical degree.

“I had a much clearer vision of what I wanted. I was a lot more focused,” Dugue said.

At Temple, Dugue finished in the top third of students at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine, receiving a scholarship and the Jerry Zaslow Memorial Award, a universitywide honor reserved for students who demonstrate high academic and well-rounded achievement.

He was also named to the Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society and the Gold Humanism Honor Society, both prestigious recognitions for medical students with exemplary records for academics and patient care.

Putting the pieces together

Dugue’s hard work in medical school paid off, helping to secure a postdoctoral residency at the Weill Cornell Medical College. Located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the program is jointly sponsored by Ivy League universities Cornell and Columbia and is one of the most competitive in the nation, accepting about one in every 600 applicants.

At Weill Cornell, Dugue is in training to become a plastic surgeon, a discipline he fell in love with for the palpability of its results.

“In general medicine, I was unsatisfied with the prolonged treatment course,” Dugue said. “I like having the power to fix a problem at the tip of my fingers.”

While many people might equate plastic surgery with elective, cosmetic procedures, Dugue explains that much of the field actually deals with restoring “form and function” to people after traumatic injuries or treatments. That can include breast reconstruction following a mastectomy, grafting parts of a leg bone into a patient’s jaw and transplanting skin from one area to another to cover up a defect after an injury.

A full circle moment

In many ways, his work brings Dugue back to his childhood art projects, thinking creatively with materials and working with his hands to try and create something beautiful.

“You’re doing surgery but you’re also an artist in a sense,” Dugue said.

Dugue is now in his second year of a six-year residency and says the training wheels are starting to come off. The surgeons at Weill Cornell are offering him an increasing amount of autonomy to take the lead in procedures.

He finds that he carries his history with him every day. “Generally speaking, minority patients are super excited to have physicians that resemble them,” he said. “It’s nice being able to be there for them.”

As well, he hopes to serve as a role model for underrepresented students who may dream of careers in medicine, a responsibility that dates to his time volunteering with youth programs at Drexel and Temple.

And he carries with him something he learned from his aunt, grandmother and mother, who passed away last year: a deep dedication to serving others. “I always try to be as warm as possible with patients. My philosophy is that nobody enjoys being in the hospital; they’d rather be home with friends and family,” Dugue said. “Even on a bad day, you should put your best foot forward to make them feel welcome.”