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Join ophthalmologist Jade Wong as she shares her firsthand experience of attending a Botox training session that took an unexpected turn when cadaver heads became the teaching tools. Discover the initial shock and subsequent evolution of emotions as Jade navigated through the surreal environment of a conference room filled with gowned physicians and draped cadaver heads. Hear about the unique challenges and unexpected reactions encountered while learning to administer cosmetic injections on these remarkably lifelike specimens. Through Jade’s insightful commentary, gain a deeper understanding of the ethical considerations surrounding the use of cadavers in medical education, particularly in the realm of cosmetic procedures.

Jade Wong is an ophthalmologist and comedian.

She discusses her KevinMD article, “Botox for the beheaded.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome Jade Wong. She’s an ophthalmologist, and today’s KevinMD article is “Botox for the beheaded.” Jade, welcome to the show.

Jade Wong: Thank you, Kevin, it’s great to be here.

Kevin Pho: We’ll talk about your story in a little bit. First off, briefly share your journey.

Jade Wong: Sure. It was March 2020. Like every other eye doctor, I was looking forward to that year. 2020, it’s our gold standard.

I was having a good day. I see a sweet patient who tells me a story about her grandkid. Another patient comes in with Crazy Glue stuck on both eyeballs. I sent her home happy and glueless. I go to lunch with my assistant Mike. He’s eating chicken wings, talking about the new virus. The only corona I’m catching is a beer here.

Then I realize it is Friday the 13th. And I know I’m a doctor, but my mom was superstitious and some of that rubbed off on me. To be safe, I cancel patient 13, rebook him with patient eight, because in Chinese culture eight is a lucky number.

Not lucky enough. By Monday the pandemic shuts down our office. It opens, but I take a medication that makes me more at risk unless I triple mask, which means I wear a mask, goggles, and a full face shield on top of my chunky eyeglasses. I mean, I look like a bookish undersized welder.

I look in my patient’s eye. There is a problem. I can’t see. Too many layers, with a bunch of Mike’s greasy fingerprints. And with eyeballs, I can’t be off by a millimeter. My patients don’t want to see the world like Picasso.

I have to quit, and my 30-year career, my income, poof, disappear. Did I mention I’m an eye doctor? I didn’t see that coming.

So I busy myself with decluttering. Pretend to be Marie Kondo, even cut my bangs like her. Does this spark joy? I enunciate, because at the last show this guy thought I said bok choy. I get rid of thousands of toothpicks, and my cat. Then I get really sad. I think because I miss my toothpicks.

My son comes home for a few months, for family time, for free rent. He’s watching the comedian Dave Chappelle while I’m doing my own standup routine, cooking dinner. My son is laughing his head off, so I go to the sofa, and now I’m laughing my head off.

Over the next hour I fall head over heels in love with standup. Then I watched hundreds of hours of comedy. I had to make up for lost time. I grew up in an Asian immigrant family, went to Harvard, hung around, yeah, like we’re all so hilarious.

So I join Toastmasters to face my lifelong fear of public speaking. I write my introductory icebreaker speech and it puts me to sleep. Then I remember Dave Chappelle, and I sprinkle in a few jokes. One even gets a huge laugh. From me.

But a little voice inside my head says, what if I tried doing standup? Another voice says, that is crazy.

But over the next year I listen to my what if voice. What if I take an online comedy class, find my tribe of comedians, learn to write and tell a good joke? All of that happens. I mean, I have to work hard and deal with rejection, but hey, I raised a teenager.

The world starts to open up. I want to perform live, but it’s kind of scary. I’m at this wool shop and it’s just the owner. She asks where she can see my set, and I say, well, what if I do it right now? She goes, well, great, but you know I don’t laugh at comedy shows. I say, no problem, if you laugh just once I’m happy. She laughs at that.

I start my set. All around me, piled to the ceiling, bundles of fluffy wool. After my best joke I hear, well. I take that as a laugh. I finish. The shopkeeper says wait, goes to the storeroom, comes back, hands me a mini bottle of Smirnoff vodka. Huh. I do my first show, I get paid with a shot of hard liquor.

You know, I lost my eye doctor gig, but what if I am a comedian? I want to get better, so I have to perform, and I can drive an hour to San Francisco to real open mics. But here’s the thing, I’ve got bad night vision. It’s always better to get to the club and then kill.

I’m at a local park and there are some young people sitting nearby. I think, what if that park bench is an open mic? I go over and say, I’m a standup comedian, would you like to hear a free three-minute set, right here right now? Oh, it’s OK to say no, but you’re going to miss out.

A few months later I’m at that same park bench doing my stealth comedy to two lovely women. I forget one joke, I mess up the punchline of the next. But before I can feel bad, one of them goes, it’s been a tough week, but I laugh so hard my cheeks hurt. The other goes, you know, after watching you, I’m going to take that salsa class.

I get a call from their friend, a news reporter. She interviews me and shoots video for the local press, which catches the eye of comedy club owners, which gets me my first cash paying gigs. I rake in enough to buy three mini bottles of Smirnoff vodka. Let the party begin.

Kevin Pho: Thank you, that was a brilliant story, I loved it.

Jade Wong: Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So tell us about what your life is like now, former ophthalmologist, now standup comedian.

Jade Wong: Sure. So, as a young person and teenager I was a bit of a perfectionist, I have to admit. And going into medicine and ophthalmology just encouraged more of those perfectionist tendencies, rightfully so. I mean, doing eye surgery, you want to be precise. But I also chose hobbies like playing piano and taking ballet classes that encouraged me to think about doing things perfectly.

What I love about doing standup comedy is that it gives me a wonderful outlet to make mistakes. In standup comedy everyone expects to bomb. You have to roll with the punches, you have to try new things and realize that often you’re going to stumble, fall down, you have to pick yourself up and try to get the laugh the next time.

So my life right now is focused on getting better at writing and performing comedy, which I have found, amazingly, I love doing, because I used to have this extreme fear of public speaking.

Kevin Pho: Do you miss medicine?

Jade Wong: I do miss medicine. I miss mostly the interactions with patients, and I would say specifically those times when we were relaxed enough that we could exchange stories, and when there was some humor in the story. I always found that so gratifying.

I would see patients over the years who had chronic conditions like glaucoma, so I loved being able to ask them about their family life, find out what was happening with their hobbies. So that’s the part I miss most about medicine.

Kevin Pho: Now, there are some physicians out there who have a background in standup comedy. Now, having experienced both worlds, do you feel like there’s a connection between medicine and comedy?

Jade Wong: I think one of the things I strive to do with standup comedy is to not make it just a performance, but to actually listen to my audience, because that way I can relate better to them, I can have them help me shape the set. So in that way, that emphasis on listening and making it a conversation is similar to medicine. It’s just a bigger audience that you have.

Kevin Pho: So you wrote the story on KevinMD back in 2021, “Botox for the beheaded.” Tell us about this story.

Jade Wong: Sure. This story was based on an experience I had way back in 2009. I was in a practice with all guy ophthalmologists, and in 2009 we decided as a group that we wanted to add cosmetic offerings for our patients.

I remember everyone looking at me, and there was this feeling that, well, Botox is mostly for women, you’re our woman in the practice, why don’t you do it?

So I went to this workshop that was training people to do cosmetic injections. I didn’t realize until I arrived that it was going to be a workshop using fresh cadaver heads. There was no mention of that in the course listing.

I remember the dry lab the evening before. I went up to the speaker and expressed my concern that we were going to be working on cadaver heads, and he said, don’t worry, they’re fresh. Which was not reassuring. So I went to the workshop the next day. I didn’t sleep very well.

And the article was a way to help me process my emotions, because I must say the workshop itself was unsettling. By writing about it, it helped me see it in a slightly different perspective, and it also gave me the chance to share the experience and to start a conversation. So yes, that was a way that I appreciated being able to create a story and add a little humor into it, to help me deal with something that was challenging.

Kevin Pho: What was it like inside that room?

Jade Wong: I remember getting in line to get gowned and gloved, and there was that doctor in front of me who commented on the meal that he had the evening before, and it just seemed so surreal.

You could see the tables with a pan that looked like a turkey roasting pan, each with this mass underneath a blue cloth. And I think everyone was having emotions. I was having emotions. I was kind of dreading lifting up the cloth. But, true to doctor form, we were all great at compartmentalizing. I didn’t really hear any comments about how this was challenging emotionally. I was feeling it, I didn’t say anything. And it was almost as if everyone was trying to make it just like any other day, any other workshop, any other learning experience. So we doctors are really good at that.

And the events that occurred in the story pretty much followed reality. I did have three women at my table. There was some shock when there was a thought that there might be some body fluid contact from the cadaver onto someone’s face. So it was not boring, I would say that, but it was surreal more than anything else.

Kevin Pho: So just to be clear, you were in a room with several severed cadaver heads in what you describe as these pans covered in a cloth, and you had to lift up the cloth and then practice Botox injection on these heads?

Jade Wong: Botox and cosmetic filler injections, that is correct. And there were probably closer to 15 to 20 of the cadaver heads.

Kevin Pho: It could almost be a scene from some type of horror movie.

Jade Wong: It was five days before Halloween.

Kevin Pho: So as you reflect on this that happened more than a decade ago?

Jade Wong: Well, yes. After the experience I actually wrote down some notes about it, some details, which I am so glad I did, because it would have been really hard to write about it so many years later without having taken notes.

I think it was helpful to have some time pass before I wrote it, with a bit of a humorous perspective. But it really did help to be creative about it, and to look at it again years later from a slightly shifted perspective. It did kind of bother me since it happened, and I thought about it, but it wasn’t until I wrote about it that I could actually process my emotions.

Kevin Pho: To your knowledge, is that the way we still train clinicians with Botox injections and fillers today?

Jade Wong: That’s a good question. I pretty much have separated myself from this whole issue of whether it was a good idea to be practicing on cadaver heads. I do feel that it would have been better for us psychically, and from a technical perspective, to be practicing injections on live human models, and they would have benefited from the cosmetic procedures. But I haven’t found out, and I assume that this is not happening. I mean, just the expense alone of doing it would be prohibitive. But I certainly hope that this is not happening.

Kevin Pho: Did you have any debrief sessions with some of your fellow workshop attendees after that whole experience, to talk about how surreal that experience was?

Jade Wong: I didn’t. I think my last paragraph of the story was, I wonder if people who were in the workshop with me thought about this, reflected on it, or if they just merged back on the highway and didn’t look back. So I have not spoken with other participants, and I just used the writing to communicate.

Kevin Pho: And after this workshop, did you have a thriving Botox and cosmetic filler practice within your ophthalmology clinic?

Jade Wong: As it turned out, I did offer cosmetic injections. I would say it was perhaps one to 2 percent of my practice.

I did become a little less judgmental, I think, about people who have cosmetic procedures. The times I did the injections, I was better able to appreciate that it really made a positive difference in a patient’s view of themselves, and it’s such a minimally invasive procedure. Botox is very, very safe, cosmetic filler injections have a very small risk. So I became less judgmental about cosmetic procedures after doing them. But it was never a big part of my practice.

Kevin Pho: Now, do you ever incorporate stories similar to this in your current standup routine? When you tell your stories, do you incorporate your experiences as a physician in your past life today?

Jade Wong: Absolutely. I actually have a joke about a patient’s request for Botox injections in one of my sets. I have a whole set that focuses on ophthalmology.

I actually was inspired by fellow ophthalmologist comedian Dr. Glaucomflecken, who is amazing. In an interview he said that he makes it a point never to punch down on patients, and I take that to heart. I try not to have any jokes that would be offensive to patients, or make it seem like I’m talking down about them.

Kevin Pho: Now, you and Dr. Glaucomflecken are both ophthalmologists with a background in standup comedy. Is there something about the field of ophthalmology that lends itself to that?

Jade Wong: Oh, I’m not sure about that. I’m very proud that such a wonderful comedian is an ophthalmologist. I frankly wish there were more of us.

I have a wonderful comedian friend who is a retired anesthesiologist, and she comes up with wonderful jokes about passing gas. So I think there is fodder in every specialty for making premises and punchlines. I think every doctor should think that they are sitting on a gold mine.

Kevin Pho: And where can people find you performing?

Jade Wong: So if they look me up on social media, my handle is Jade Wong Comedy, that’s J-A-D-E Wong comedy. They can find a listing of performances there. If they’d like to reach me, I actually have branched out and am doing comedic corporate convention style talks. They can reach me using the email [email protected].

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Jade Wong. She’s an ophthalmologist turned comedian. Today’s KevinMD article is “Botox for the beheaded.” Jade, as always, we’ll end with some of your take-home messages to the KevinMD audience.

Jade Wong: So I think it is helpful, when facing something challenging, and life is always throwing us curveballs, to remember to look for the funny. With the Botox workshop, I was unsettled by the experience, but writing about it in a funny way was very helpful to me.

I think sometimes we need to distance ourselves a bit, with time, if we’ve had a challenging situation. But ultimately, if you can look back and chuckle even over a small part of the difficult situation, that can be really healing. You don’t even have to share the joke with anyone else.

The other thing I would say is, stay curious. Ask what if, often. When I unexpectedly lost my job, I was shocked, I was at a loss initially. But after asking, over many months, what if? What if I try standup comedy? What if I tell my jokes to that lady in the wool shop? It actually helped me find something that brings me so much joy. So I encourage you all to ask what if, to be curious. I hope you find something wonderful by staying curious.

Kevin Pho: Jade, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Jade Wong: It was a wonderful opportunity and experience. Thank you so much, Kevin, for having me.