Shanda Blackmon, M.D., M.P.H.

Hi, my name is Shanda Blackmon, and I’m a cardiothoracic surgeon. I do different types of procedures on patients who have lung cancer, esophageal cancer, cancer of the thymus, which is in front of the heart. I also operate on the lower part of the esophagus through the abdomen for patients who have hernias or a disease called achalasia. I also rebuild the airway when people have an abnormal connection between the airway and the esophagus, and I also specialize in rebuilding the esophagus when something goes wrong and they need something like stomach or small bowel used to rebuild the esophagus.

I really enjoy what I do. When I started medical school, I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician, and then when I went into my residency training program, I thought I wanted to do minimally invasive general surgery. I kept getting drawn to thoracic cases, drawn to thoracic surgery, and ultimately I chose this profession because I love caring for patients with cancer. I love challenging cases, I love teaching residents, and I just really love the interaction that I get with building a team around the patient for a complex case and assembling all the members of the team, getting all the different things that are involved to make an extraordinary outcome possible.

The reason why I came to Mayo Clinic to practice is because this is the place where miracles happen. Mayo Clinic is one of the few places in the world where you can say to a patient, yes, I can help you; when many other places around the country said no. I think we enable the miracles to happen through the unique technology that we have here at Mayo Clinic -- things like 3D printing – our amazing nurses that help us to care for these patients on a specialized floor that’s designed just to care for thoracic patients, our incredibly well-trained operating room. The people that work with us in the operating room have been doing these types of cases day in and day out. We constantly retrain with them. And having that nuclear team to give you the best possible outcome makes all the difference. I also think that the people that help us in the clinic and make sure that you get in and get out -- everybody is an essential part of the team, and I really enjoy working on those teams to give people this impossible surgery that sometimes couldn’t be done anywhere else in the world. And that’s really what makes me tick. Thanks.