The new surgeon at Carondelet Holy Cross Hospital stitched up knife and gun wounds when he trained in surgery in Oakland, Calif. Later he treated sports injuries in the Sierra Nevada mountain town of Truckee, Calif.

Dr. Jacinto Orozco, a Tucson native, became the general surgeon at Carondelet Holy Cross Hospital on Oct. 1. Contributed photo.

But gall bladder surgery and appendectomies, not trauma, will make up most of his work in Nogales, said Dr. Jacinto Orozco. He began work at Holy Cross on Oct. 1, its first full-time surgeon in several years, said Assistant Administrator Dina Sanchez.

“Now there’s continuity of care and no long wait for surgery,” she said.

The biggest obstacle now is getting pre-approval from the patient’s insurance company, Orozco said. “In a perfect world, we would see the patient today and do the procedure tomorrow.”

If the patient has an emergency, such as an appendectomy, he does the surgery immediately, Orozco said.

In Truckee, he and a colleague successfully operated on a man who had accidentally shot himself in the heart with a nail gun, Orozco said.

“He had no time to go anywhere else,” he said. The story made the pages of Reader’s Digest and the Journal of Trauma in 1995.

Orozco doesn’t expect to see many trauma patients at Holy Cross, he said. People injured in car crashes are usually airlifted to the trauma center at University Medical Center, where specialized surgeons are on call.

“Patients who would not have survived a car accident 30 years ago are surviving now because of seatbelts and airbags,” Orozco said.

But doctors are treating more outdoor injuries because “our recreation activities are more violent than they used to be.” he said. ATV and motorcycle crashes and bungee jumping can cause injuries to multiple systems.

Orozco was born in Tucson and graduated from the University of Arizona College of Medicine in 1979, he said. After six years in Oakland and 17 years in Truckee, he came back toTucson in 2003 to practice with the Presidio Surgical Group.

“General surgery is smaller that it used to be,” Orozco said about his specialty.

Mostly he’s operating on the patient’s torso, he said. Nowadays, heart repairs go to a cardiac surgeon, fractures to an orthopedic surgeon, and spine and brain problems to a neurosurgeon.

Orozco is branching out to hand surgery after completing a one-year fellowship in Oklahoma in July 2008. In Nogales, he has already removed a growth from a patient’s finger, he said. He expects to treat patients with carpal tunnel syndrome as well.

Holy Cross reminds Orozco of the small hospital where he practiced in Truckee, he said.

“If you put this hospital up against other small hospitals in the U.S., it would compare very favorably.”

Holy Cross CEO Wanona “Winnie” Fritz praised Orozco for his “strong clinical and surgical talents,” she said. “He exhibits such a caring ‘bedside manner,’ which serves as an example to all of us at HCH.”