Making the Rounds with the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

KIRK KERKORIAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UNLV

Making the Rounds

June 8, 2021 Issue 284

Friends & Colleagues,

There is no doubt that teamwork has proved vital in healthcare delivery, having a real immediate and positive impact on results and patient safety. The increasing complexity of medical cases and the specialization demands that healthcare teams be finely tuned. In today’s newsletter, we focus on one of our students, Mason Montano, a former ICU nurse who rightly believes you can learn something from anybody on a healthcare team, including the patient, helping to ensure that the right treatment course is delivered.

Marc J. Kahn, M.D.

Dean, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

Medicine By The Numbers

What is a rare disease?

In the United States, a rare disease is defined as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. Other countries have their own official definitions of a rare disease.

In the European Union, a disease is defined as rare when it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people.

How many rare diseases are there?

There may be as many as 7,000 rare diseases. The total number of Americans living with a rare disease is estimated at between 25-30 million.

Source: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/pages/31/faqs-about-rare-diseases

UNLV School of Nursing Grad on Road to Becoming

Kerkorian School of Medicine Physician

Mason Montano volunteering at the UNLV vaccination site alongside one of his nursing professors. Montano is the first student to graduate from the UNLV School of Nursing and work as a nurse before joining our medical school.

To the young teen worried about his mother’s health, nurses became his translators, the medical professionals who served as a conduit for the medical information that a busy physician didn’t always translate into layman’s terms -- the medical information so emotionally valuable to the loved ones of patients.

Mason Montano, now a fourth-year student at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, was an honor student at Green Valley High School in Henderson as his mother dealt with a rare autoimmune disease that saw her frequently in and out of the hospital and going through years of chemotherapy that left her immunocompromised.

To say he was impressed by the nurses’ ability to communicate with a patient and an anxious family would be a classic understatement. He so appreciated how they got the word out, in addition to caring for patients, that he decided to make a career in nursing. Yes, Montano was beyond impressed.

“I wanted to be that middle line person to kind of explain the situation to patients and loved ones," Montano says.

So he enrolled in the UNLV School of Nursing, graduating in 2012.

For the next six years, he worked as an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) nurse at St. Rose Siena and Desert Springs Hospitals.

But a funny thing happened on his way to a long nursing career. Montano began to think about becoming a physician.

“I had zero intentions of going into medicine, becoming a physician,” he says. “I wanted to become a nurse since maybe a sophomore in high school...I wanted to get into nursing because my mom has Wegener’s granulomatosis...and I saw how the healthcare experience affected her...But...in the ICU I saw you could actually practice medicine, the science side of things, and have patient interaction that actually is meaningful -- so like the art of nursing can be done in medicine as well, being empathetic with your patients, to actually have that kind of therapeutic conversation with people, helping them understand what the concern is...I saw how some of the intensivists that I work with actually have that sort of relationship with their patients, actually explaining things where they understand it. It made me bridge more into medicine.”

After taking about four years of additional classes, he applied to medical school and was accepted.

Today, Mason Montano is the first student to graduate from the UNLV School of Nursing and work as a nurse before becoming a student at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine.

As he worked as a nurse, Montano had also come to realize he had a desire to one day lead a medical team. One day he saw the health of a patient crater before his eyes. How a physician handled the crisis made his respect for physicians grow.

“I think you can learn something from anybody, whether it be nurses, respiratory therapists, physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists, whoever is on your team.”

Mason Montano, Medical Student

“It was a pretty ill patient that was actually starting to improve and then had this significant bleeding event, like spurting up to the ceiling from the tracheostomy site. Our ICU doctor came in and stopped this bleeding and managed to prevent the code from happening in addition to getting everybody to where she can do a bronchoscopy and stop the bleeding -- all while being very well-maintained and explaining everything to the nurses and to the other staff. Just watching her manage this acutely ill patient with a calm head and just seeing all of the accumulation of all her medical training and communication skills happening in front of me was amazing. I was like, wow, I can appreciate this from a nursing perspective, but I want to be at the point of managing a whole team….I realized this is probably more of what I want to do.”

Mason Montano presenting a research project for the Kerkorian School of Medicine.

His nursing background, Montano says, will help him as a physician. He believes his background of working in clinical practice in the hospital, coupled with his interaction with patients, will give him a running start in working with medical teams as a physician. “I think you can learn something from anybody, whether it be nurses, respiratory therapists, physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists, whoever is on your team. I would actually appreciate having a conversation with nurses, ‘ What do you think is going on? Hey, what do you think we can do differently?’ I know I appreciated that when doctors would talk to me when I was practicing as a nurse...It helps build the team...I saw how important a team is when I worked at Desert Springs after the Oct. 1 (2017) shooting on the Strip. Fundamentally, there always has to be a head of the team to make the final decisions, but it doesn’t have to be this patriarchal system of, ‘Whatever I say goes.’ I think getting input from everybody that’s involved...for shared decision making...especially the patient...is really important.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit some parts of the country particularly hard last spring, Montano, who has kept his nursing license active, applied to become a traveling ICU nurse in what he viewed as a national emergency. He felt sure his training could be utilized in places like New York City, where ICU nurses were desperately needed because many in the profession had been struck by the disease. He believed he could travel because all of the clinical rotations at the start of his third year of medical school had become virtual and he could study while on the road. That didn’t happen, however. “Because I hadn’t worked in the capacity of an ICU nurse within the past year I couldn’t be a travel nurse,” Montano says.

Montano found an outlet closer to home to use his skill set during the pandemic, helping to vaccinate patients at UNLV against COVID-19, “I was really excited to go and be able to help, especially teach some people how to give vaccines or even give them myself, which was great.”

After his anticipated graduation from medical school in the spring of 2022, Montano plans on doing his residency in internal medicine and later doing a fellowship either in cardiology or in pulmonary critical care.

He is intensely involved in his medical education and plans to be the same way in his medical practice.

“If you go through the day just kind of getting through the day, would you feel comfortable with what you did today?” he asks. “Would you take care of your mom that way?”