Annual Publication 2025 FINAL 05292025 accessible - Flipbook - Page 44
T
he rigors of a medical residency are daunting.
Long hours, little sleep, fatigue, stress. The last
thing you would want to do is add a puppy to
that mix, right? Not for Demitri Franzoni, MD,
third-year resident in the department of plastic
surgery, and his wife, Jessica Franzoni, MD, a
third-year resident in gynecologic surgery and obstetrics.
Married for three years, the Franzonis are navigating their
residencies with hard work and dedication … to their training, to
each other, and to their two dogs. Says Dr. Jessica Franzoni about
the recent addition of their puppy, “We didn’t have enough things
going on!”
PHOTO: JULIAN FOX
For Dr. Demitri Franzoni, his path to plastic surgery was
unconventional, at best. Beginning his undergraduate education
at UNLV as a hotel management major, he switched to 昀椀nance.
His senior year, he decided that it was actually medicine that he
wanted to pursue.
44 KIRK KERKORIAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UNLV
“My junior year, I started volunteering in the emergency
department here at UMC [University Medical Center] because I
had a hunch that I wanted to pursue medicine, but I wanted to
be sure before making the switch from 昀椀nance,” he says. “Once I
started medical school I knew right away that I wanted to go into
a surgical specialty. I enjoyed learning full-body anatomy and the
challenges that came with having to know every aspect of the
human body. I’m also very meticulous, so that all kind of pointed
towards plastic surgery.”
Beyond that, Dr. Demitri Franzoni appreciated the wide breadth
of the types of surgeries that can be done in plastic surgery. “You
could do anything from moving tissue from one part of the body
to another as a free 昀氀ap … once that’s done, you could do a skin
graft, then you could do a cosmetic type facelift. You could do
all those in the same day, which not a lot of specialties have that
wide breadth of surgical cases.”
