Our Beginning that Led to our Future Success
Our Beginning that Led to our Future Successby
Lauri Kane, RD MPH, ScD
Part 1: 48 years ago Dr. Dean and Lauri Kane began their life partnership
How We Met
Dean and I were raised in totally different lifestyles but destined to meet in our lives. I grew up in a very middle-class family in Maplewood NJ. Dean had the exotic life of being born in Miami, spent his first 6 years of life in Cuba, back to Miami and then his middle and high school years in Puerto Rico.
We learned that we had applied to the exact same colleges where we met at U of Florida. Our meeting was not quite the norm. In my freshman year, I had been dating my high school boyfriend who came down to U of FL with me for school. He joined the same fraternity as Dean, and they became friends. Both were sophomores. Dean was not my type of guy: pure nerd with bottle thick glasses and his nose in his books all the time studying to become a doctor. I tried to fix him up with my girlfriends.
It was spring-break, and we were talking what we all were doing when Dean invited me and my boyfriend down to Puerto Rico for the break. So excited to go to an Island for the first time, I was super excited. So, the three of us go to Dean’s parents home for the break. What a shocking surprise to find he grew up in a penthouse overlooking the Condado beaches of San Juan. Every day we headed to the beach and back to his parent’s home for delicious gourmet dinners that Dean’s mom cooked. We spent a night at the El San Juan Casino and in those years, you needed to wear a gown and jacket for men. It was a new world for me and a new way of seeing the nerdy Dean.
The clincher was seeing Dean in a speedo bathing suit. All of a sudden, the Clark Kent takes off his nerdy glasses and is totally buffed in a speedo bathing suit. He grew up swimming everyday in San Juan and had a swimmer’s body. Without the glasses I saw the superman under the disguise and found a very sexy and handsome boy. And so, the attraction began. It was the first time he had seen me in a bikini, and I think the attraction was quite mutual.
We came back from spring break. He asked me out and I broke up with my boyfriend to begin dating Dean. Our love for each other was true and deep. I knew I found the love of my life. We were inseparable. We dated the 3 years prior to Dean going onto medical school in Puerto Rico. I had one more year before I graduated, and it was a very difficult year being apart.
Medical School and Puerto Rico
He was the true force in encouraging my ongoing education to become something I didn’t think I was capable of. He saw the smarts in me that I didn’t realize I had. I finished college as a nutritionist and when I graduated, we got married and moved to Puerto Rico.
In medical school, Dean spoke to one of his professors who was a nutritionist and found out that there was a master’s degree program at the Puerto Rico School of Public Health. The government would pay my tuition and give me a stipend to live on. I got my MPH degree and realized I loved public health as a career.
Our life in Puerto Rico was a dream come true. We had a fantastic time traveling throughout the Caribbean, going to the beach every weekend, and living a real Island life. We worked hard and played hard.
Part 2: 32 years ago Dr. Dean and Lauri Kane Started their Solo Plastic Surgery Practice
Listen to how they developed their business partnership
Our Years in General Surgery and Plastic Surgery Residency
When Dean finished medical school, he decided he wanted to be a general surgeon. I was now very excited to go for my PHD in Public Health. We planned that Dean would apply to general surgery residencies where there was a school of public health for me. We traveled around the US interviewing in our individual programs. Wherever Dean got in we would have to move to as this was the very first year of the residency match. If you matched you had to go to that program. Baltimore was our very last stop of the cities we traveled. I came out of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health knowing this was my number one choice. Dean came out of Sinai Hospital and felt the same. We were so fortunate as Dean matched and I was accepted at Hopkins.
We moved to Baltimore in 1980. Baltimore was just beginning its downtown renovation of the Inner Harbor. Mayor Schaeffer was the mayor at the time and Cal Ripken and the Orioles won the world series. It was a great time to be in Baltimore.
I absolutely found my home at Hopkins. I loved the program, loved my professors, and thought I could live the rest of life at the school. Dean on the other hand spent 5 grueling years in a general surgery residency program at Sinai. Because we hardly got to see each other, it gave me the concentrated time to complete my doctoral degree in 4 years. But the times we did have together were spent with our new friendships we developed in Baltimore and to this day, 40 years later, we are still close to those friends.
Having one more year for Dean to finish his residency, we decided that it was time to have our first baby. I walked down my graduation aisle 8 months pregnant. I enjoyed my first year as a mother being able to continue being a researcher at Hopkins part-time and spending the rest with our new daughter. Dean finally had more time in his 5th year to enjoy Erica and we had a beautiful new family life.
Dean realized that general surgery was not for him and that the creative and artistic side of him guided him to becoming a plastic surgeon. He then had to do another 2 more years in plastic surgery residency, and we returned to U of Florida where he was accepted. We had hoped that we would remain in Florida in our future as our families all lived there. I was able to get an Assistant Professorship at U of South Florida School of Public Health in Tampa in which I would travel one day a week from Gainesville to Tampa to teach.
Again, Dean had a grueling 2 years of residency, even worse than his general surgery residency. He was on call every other night and his nights off would not get home until our daughter was sound asleep. Erica, now one year old never got to see Dean. When he was home, she was not sure who he was. How I got pregnant I’m not sure. But our son Alex was born at the end of that first year.
Our Return to Baltimore
The plan was for Dean to join a group plastic surgery practice in Tampa where I was a professor. The problem was that there was no plastic surgery group looking for a junior associate. When we had left Baltimore, there was a plastic surgery group who had offered Dean a position when he finished his plastic surgery residency.
Since we had loved Baltimore, and I had loved Hopkins, it was a perfect decision for us to return to Baltimore to live, work and raise our children. I became a researcher at in the same department where I had graduated with my professors. I was home again. My plan was to not become a professor yet, since our children were so young. Dean joined the group practice and found himself again in a very grueling, demanding, and hard-working situation. For the next 3 years he was on-call non-stop for this group. He was so totally exhausted from all these years of training and now in practice working the same residency hours. We decided it was time for Dean to start his own solo practice.
Part 3: The Kane’s history with Dr. Zein Obagi and their appreciation for healthy skin
Why Skin Rejuvenation is the foundation for all Dr. Kane’s surgical facelifts
Starting our Solo Practice in Plastic Surgery
So, in 1990 was the beginning of Dean’s solo practice. I had to make the hard decision to leave Hopkins to help get Dean off the ground in his practice. I thought I would eventually be able to return to Hopkins once he became established, but that would never happen. It was hard establishing a practice and I realized it would take years before he would become a well-known plastic surgeon in Baltimore.
Of all the years of our marriage, working together was the most demanding and hardest on us. With two young children, very little help at home and in the office, no computers, no internet everything was done by paper. I had to learn the plastic surgery field, medical billing, accounting, managing employees and administrating a medical office. This was not easy for me plus raising our children. Throughout our lives in Baltimore, we had no family to rely on, so it was always nannies and housekeepers to help us with our children. This was hard on our children, because we were always at our office trying to meet the demands of running and building a practice. Life took its toll on all of us.
Dean now being responsible for his own practice was still working as hard as ever trying to support his family and new office. He established himself in breast cancer reconstruction as well as in wound healing. He wrote chapters in books on wound healing and would create the wound center at Northwest Hospital. Over time the cosmetic cases started to come along, and we would have a very nice mixed practice of both reconstruction and cosmetic surgery.
The foundation of our Cosmetic Practice Today
The change in our practice evolved with meeting Dr. Zein Obagi in 2005 and learning his philosophy on skin health. Having dealt with so many wound patients and figuring out how to heal these very complex cases, Dean found in Dr. Obagi’s teachings the answer to truly getting patients to heal and reverse the aging process.
It has been well over 27 years, that we have used Dr. Obagi’s philosophy of healthy skin to be the foundation for all our future cosmetic strategies. As Dean will say, I can move skin from one place to another, but if the skin is old, thin, pigmented and sun damaged, I have only moved old skin. The key is to rejuvenate, reverse the aging of skin and start with very healthy skin, before attempting to perform surgical procedures. The procedures will last a lifetime if maintained with proper skin care. This has been the success of our practice. To help a person truly reverse their aging, stop and prevent future aging.
Part 4: The Kane’s Unique strategy to achieve total anti-aging of your face
Listen how they do the evaluation of your face to determine the best procedures for you.
Part 5: Achieve Instant Gratification with Dr. Dean Kane’s Liquid Facelift: Fillers, Botox and Sculptra
Dr. Dean Kane an Expert Injector and Experienced Facelift Surgeon
Part 6: Are you a Threadlift vs FaceLift Candidate or Combination?
The Kane’s describe how they determine which procedures are right for you.
