South Peninsula Hospital recently opened a plastic surgery clinic.

Services will take place at the Renew Clinic located at 4521 Hohe Street with provider Dr. Ian Wisecarver. Wisecarver has been in Homer for approximately three weeks and services were started at the clinic two weeks ago. The clinic will offer aesthetic and reconstructive surgery.

The opening of the new clinic was “the fastest ramp-up I’ve ever seen in my life,” Wisecarver said.

He arrived on a Saturday and had two days of general hospital orientation. On the following Wednesday the clinic was seeing its first patients — with surgeries already scheduled.

Wisecarver provided an introduction to the Homer News in the clinic building, which is still being set up for full services. At the time of the interview, July 31, there was a temporary exam and procedure room running. They are planning to expand to have three exam rooms.

Wisecarver has never lived in Homer before but has been visiting the community for several years of summer fishing. He said he first met with SPH’s CEO Ryan Smith two years ago and they began discussing the idea of offering plastic surgery services.

Originally from New Orleans, Wisecarver completed his medical training at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Prior to a career in plastic surgery, Wisecarver worked in Louisiana offshore oil refineries and completed a partial degree in chemical engineering.

“I decided halfway through that degree to go to medical school and start traveling and doing extreme sports to try to broaden my horizons,” he said.

When he first started medical school his interests were in orthopedic surgery as a result of his own back injuries related to rugby. But, his medical interests eventually changed to head and neck anatomy and the next field he considered was ear, nose and throat.

He completed a month of head and neck surgery training at a hospital in Bangkok before backpacking in Southeast Asia. While backpacking, he encountered and assisted with an intense head and neck reconstruction on a Buddhist monk.

“It was some of the most intense surgery I ever saw. This man’s life was essentially mutilated by the cancer resection. And during the same surgery, the reconstructive team came in and we reconstructed his face with a rotational pectoralis flap and totally restored this guy’s ability to go out into the world and interact with people and have a normal life. And that event is what pushed me towards reconstructive surgery,” he said.

Wisecarver said the ability to restore form and function for people and provide some semblance of normalcy after big surgeries like this “is something that I was driven to be very passionate about so I decided to go into plastic surgery.”

“During my residency training, I fell in love with aesthetic surgery as well.”

According to South Peninsula Hospital’s Renew Plastic Surgery website, the new clinic specializes in aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery and is “committed to offering services that enhance quality of life.”

A partial list of the services now offered by Wisecarver in the Renew Clinic in both aesthetic and reconstructive surgery is included on the hospital’s website.

Wisecarver listed four subfields in plastic surgery and examples of procedures in each field.

The first is hand and limb, including things like fingers, hands, major limb replantation, hand fractures and cut tendons. Second, is craniofacial surgery, such as cleft lips and palates, cranial faults, head and neck reconstruction for adults that have oral cancers or pharyngeal cancers and facial fractures from major accidents such as being “ejected through a windshield.”

General reconstruction includes things like breast cancer reconstruction, upper and lower extremity trauma. “If patients have big wounds, we come in and can bring new skin, muscle, bone, whatever, to that area to help close those wounds,” he said.

The final subfield is aesthetics.

These components are tied together in some ways, he said.

“You can put somebody back together, but if they don’t look good, they’re still not going to be happy or feel like themselves. So it’s all a continuum of trying to help people feel the most comfortable in their body and finding new and confidence by rebuilding form and function. It all flows together.”

The South Peninsula Hospital website notes that “continuing education is a priority to Dr. Wisecarver. He regularly attends plastic surgery conferences and seminars and is published in the medical literature.” Some of his academic writing can be found by searching his name on www.researchgate.net.