Note: This story contains descriptions of surgical procedures and trauma care.
At 4:20 a.m., Dr. Alexis Betancourt ’21 (MD) rolls over to answer her phone before her hospital shift begins. A trauma patient needs an emergent stent in his aorta or it could rupture. So much for a full night’s rest.
Betancourt has a strong clinical and academic focus on complex arterial and venous disease. From Garner, North Carolina, she earned her medical degree at the UNC School of Medicine, then matched residencies at UNC Health. In August, she will begin working at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte.
Here’s how the rest of her day went.
⏱️ 4:26 a.m. On my way in, I call a Code Aorta (the Bat-Signal of Vascular Surgery). Twenty minutes after arriving, I have needle access to the patient’s femoral artery, a wire in his aorta and insert the endovascular stent. Imaging shows that we’re in the right location, then I deploy the graft. A final picture shows the stent deployed, and the tear in his aorta is no longer visible. We just saved his life in 15 minutes through a needle stick.
⏱️ 6 a.m. Our workroom’s low lighting helps me decompress and restart my morning. Residents pile in to discuss patients. I sip tea and mentally catalog the things I must accomplish today.
⏱️ 7:30 a.m. I do the first timeout to verify our patient’s identity, procedure and incision site, then review imaging in our 3-D reconstruction software. I make sure the patient is prepped and that supplies for this complex endovascular case are ready. Pandora’s playlist “hip hop bbq” plays as we begin the day’s cases.
⏱️ 11:30 a.m. In the angiogram suite for a fenestrated endovascular aortic repair. As a medical student, I saw a few of these. I barely knew what was happening but couldn’t believe that we fixed a huge thoracoabdominal aneurysm through needle sticks in the groin. I access blood vessels in the belly and am about to deploy the final stent in the renal artery. I call for the next balloon. My attending looks at me and nods. I’m not sure when it all clicked into place, but over the past five years, I guess I learned a thing or two.
Surgical resident Dr. Alexis Betancourt (right) does a stent placement for a patient with assistance from surgical resident Dr. Logan Ruiz (left) at North Carolina Memorial Hospital on April 23, 2026. The X-ray monitor in the background on the left mirrors the progress of the surgery being performed by Betancourt. (Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill)
⏱️ 12:37 p.m. I prepare for an aortobifemoral bypass to restore blood flow to a patient’s feet, one of the procedures that drew me to vascular surgery as a medical student. The aorta is clamped and looks like tissue paper. Tense atmosphere. I try to focus, but my junior resident’s pager goes off.
⏱️ 2:05 p.m. A lower extremity angiogram. This patient has wounds due to decreased blood flow to her foot. I feel the attending’s presence as I struggle to cross the stenosis in her arteries in her calf. “You get one more shot,” he says. Suddenly, I get through! Guess I just needed a little encouragement…. We balloon the artery and take an image. Blood flows all the way to the tips of her toes.
⏱️ 2:54 p.m. EMS brings in a man who was shot in the thigh. I meet them in the OR. We attempt to take the tourniquet down. Blood shoots across the table and hits my mask, so we leave that up for a second. The artery has a small defect. We harvest a piece of vein from the other leg, then sew it onto the artery to patch the injury. No more bleeding and good blood flow in the foot.
⏱️ 4:30 p.m. Finished with the day’s cases, I unscrub. My team updates me on the day’s events. All patients are well. I’m writing notes when my intern calls to say a bypass patient suddenly has a lot of foot pain. I leave to check this out, then will call it a day.
Dr. Alexis Betancourt is one of roughly 1,000 medical residents at UNC Health, the healthcare system’s second-largest workforce segment. (Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill)
