Behind the Double Doors: Meet Houston Plastic Surgeon Dr. Shannon Kuruvilla

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This interview originally aired on the Meet the Doctor podcast.

Dr. Shannon Kuruvilla is back in her hometown of Houston, Texas, completing an aesthetic surgery fellowship with Dr. Bob Basu at Basu Aesthetics + Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Kuruvilla’s mission is to make sure you feel comfortable, heard, and supported in your goals. She takes the time to listen during every consultation, ensuring you feel confident in your decisions. Just like the rest of the team at Basu Aesthetics + Plastic Surgery, she believes in building long-term relationships with her patients.

As a mom of two, she has a special connection with mommy makeover patients—she understands what they’re going through. She loves helping moms feel like themselves again through restorative procedures like breast augmentation, labiaplasty, and tummy tuck. 

She’s also passionate about body contouring for patients who’ve lost significant weight and are ready to fully embrace their transformation.

Beyond aesthetics, Dr. Kuruvilla also specializes in migraine surgery, using trigger site decompression to help patients find relief. She discovered her passion for this during residency and has seen firsthand how life-changing it can be.

Take a screenshot of this or any podcast episode with your phone and show it at your consultation or appointment to receive $50 off any service at Basu Plastic Surgery and Aesthetics.

Basu Plastic Surgery + Aesthetics has two convenient locations, in Northwest Houston in the Towne Lake area of Cypress and on Post Oak in the Galleria/Uptown area. To learn more visit basuplasticsurgery.com.

Follow Dr. Basu and the team on Instagram @basuplasticsurgery

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Transcript

Dr. Bob Basu (00:08):
Welcome back to Behind the Double Doors. I’m Dr. Bob Basu.

Eva Sheie (00:11):
My guest today is Shannon Kuruvilla. She’s a plastic surgeon at Basu Aesthetics and Plastic Surgery in Houston. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:19):
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Eva Sheie (00:22):
Is this your first podcast?

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:23):
It is indeed.

Eva Sheie (00:24):
Okay. Well, you landed in a good place. I understand that you’re actually Houston native.

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:29):
I am. Proud.

Eva Sheie (00:31):
What part of town did you grow up in?

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:33):
I was born and raised in the Meyerland area, and then my family moved out to Memorial, so kind of half Meyerland, half Memorial.

Eva Sheie (00:39):
Did you go to Memorial High School?

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:41):
No, I went to a very small all girls school called Duchenne Academy. Yeah, it was great. I went to a smaller private school in the Meyerland area and then when we moved out I went to Duchenne Academy.

Eva Sheie (00:52):
How many people were in your class?

Dr. Kuruvilla (00:54):
54 girls.

Eva Sheie (00:56):
54? Yeah, I am sure, there’s no drama at all in this?

Dr. Kuruvilla (01:00):
No. Nobody got upset at each other. No one?

Eva Sheie (01:03):
No, not ever.

Dr. Kuruvilla (01:04):
No caddiness.

Eva Sheie (01:05):
And so what was your path after you finished high school? Where did you go?

Dr. Kuruvilla (01:10):
So I grew up always wanting to go to the University of Notre Dame. I got rejected out of high school and so I went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville for one year and loved my experience there. Would’ve been happy to spend four years there, but I just reapplied to Notre Dame to see if I could get in as a transfer. So I transferred to Notre Dame, went there a sophomore through senior year. I graduated from Notre Dame in 2013 and then I did a year of service with AmeriCorps. I moved to Chicago and worked at a, I lived and worked at a community for people with developmental disabilities for a year through AmeriCorps. And it was just kind of like a nice break, I think between college and medical school. And it was during that year that I applied to medical school and eventually got in. Came back and started medical school at the University of Texas at Houston. So came back home.

Eva Sheie (01:55):
During that AmeriCorps, you pretty much have to live in poverty, isn’t that kind of the?

Dr. Kuruvilla (02:00):
We live very simply, I wouldn’t say poverty. They had a house for us. I had my own bed, my own bathroom. I was very comfortable, but I was in a house with a few other volunteers. It was a shared living space, just kind of close to this large community of people with developmental disabilities that range from people with milder forms of autism all the way to people with cerebral palsy. I worked primarily in the skilled nursing facility, so I was mostly with the cerebral palsy patients, just a little bit more medically involved.

Eva Sheie (02:28):
When did you know that you wanted to go to medical school?

Dr. Kuruvilla (02:31):
When I was in high school every Wednesday we all had to go out into the community to volunteer and we were assigned to a site for a semester at a time, and I can’t remember exactly what year it was, but I was assigned to the pediatrics floor of Memorial Hermann Hospital. And I don’t know, I just have this image of seeing the doctors go through and I remember thinking if I had that job, I don’t think it would feel like work every day. I think I would really enjoy that. And I just never pictured myself sitting at a desks for too long. I also, I dunno if I was just a prophecy fulfillment. My grandfather was a plastic surgeon and I have an uncle that was a plastic surgeon, so I dunno if it just kind of ran in the family, but I got to medical school knowing that I wanted to do something that I could apply to global health in some capacity.

(03:18):
So that started off thinking I want, what does that look like? Infectious disease? Does it look like general surgery? I really enjoyed surgery. And then within general surgery, I just kind of enjoyed the variety within general surgery and I was able to do a plastic surgery rotation and that kind of nailed it, just the variety within a surgical specialty. And on top of that, in plastic surgery, you really do get to follow your patients long term. It’s not like an operate and be done, whether it’s revisions or the patient has another part of their body that they want to work upon. I think you get to form these long lasting relationships with your patients, which I think is rare in a surgical subspecialty.

Eva Sheie (03:55):
Do you remember what kinds of cases you were seeing on that rotation? What kind of impact did those particular patients have on the way you were thinking about your own career?

Dr. Kuruvilla (04:06):
Probably what I got the most exposed to in an academic institution were cancer and trauma reconstruction patients. Doing these complex flaps in these patients who have some sort of large defect. It’s much more than just the aesthetics of it. They do care about how it looks, but it is serving a huge functional role for them primarily. And then afterwards, once their cancer is gone or their defect is addressed, then there are still so many things you can do in plastic surgery where you fine tune the appearance of that flap or graft and can really get close to getting this patient whole again. It was just being able to see the patients in clinic for months and months after their surgery and hear what they would like improved upon from their reconstruction and giving them that ownership of having that conversation to say, I still feel like this could be improved upon. And plastic surgeons having the tool to help them with that.

Eva Sheie (05:04):
Where did you land after that?

Dr. Kuruvilla (05:06):
From medical school at University of Texas, I matched to University of Virginia. I actually couples match. So I met my now husband in medical school our first year of medical school. And so we were able to do something called the couples match. And what that means is you apply to your specific subspecialties, but the way you do your match is you kind of rank everything together. He matched into neurology. I matched into plastic surgery at University of Virginia, which is the first plastic surgery program in the country, interestingly enough.

Eva Sheie (05:33):
It was the original? It’s the OG?

Dr. Kuruvilla (05:35):
Yes, truly. Yeah. It has a lot of character in some of the buildings too, just with how old it is, good character. But yeah, spent the last six years there and we really loved it.

Eva Sheie (05:49):
I’ve never heard that there was a couples match that I didn’t even know that existed.

Dr. Kuruvilla (05:53):
Yeah, it’s a nice option because the match, you have a certain level of control in at least the places that you’re ranking, but you don’t have control on exactly where you’re going because you rank all the places that you’ve interviewed at. Those programs rank all of their applicants that they interviewed, and then there’s this algorithm that does the match, but they do give you the option of, you can rank combinations, so you rank like I match at UVA and he matches at UVA or I match at University of Richmond and he matches at UVA, and you can kind of go down like that, which is, it’s nice. I mean, this is during a lot of people’s formative years where they’re maybe finding themselves in romantic relationships or starting families. So it is nice that you have the option that to not be forced into a long distance relationship.

Eva Sheie (06:37):
It’s also kind of a test, right? It’s like if you go into that process together, you kind of have to be sure you want to go together.

Dr. Kuruvilla (06:43):
Oh, yeah. It’s interesting. I think some people almost use it as a game, right? Oh, I’m couples matching with this person from your city. Of course I would want to come to your program. I think there’s a little bit of strategizing it has to go into it. And then some people, I think we made sure that I had my engagement ring before I interviewing at these places, so they knew I was telling the truth about couples matching, because I think it gives programs a sense of, oh, you would probably go wherever you’re going to couples match to, your priority is to be together. It’s more so being together than ranking all these other places, if that makes sense. Yeah. We did have to know that we wanted to stay together before making that decision.

Eva Sheie (07:28):
When you go into this, so you said it’s six years, that’s kind of a long time. You’ve already been in school for a while at this point.

Dr. Kuruvilla (07:35):
I know. Yes.

Eva Sheie (07:36):
Now you’re headed off to Virginia for six years. What are you doing during that six years that gets you ready to go from there to where you are today?

Dr. Kuruvilla (07:46):
Thankfully, it’s all pretty structured. So plastic surgery started out as being this three-year fellowship that you do on top of general surgery, which can be anywhere from five to seven years. So it’s nice that they’ve changed this into an integrated program at most places. And it’s nice, while I have a whole huge appreciation for general surgery, if I am going to be practicing plastic surgery, I don’t know if I necessarily need to know how to do a cholecystectomy. So it was nice that they kind of minimize some of the more extraneous procedures. But you do get that general surgery foundation. So your first year, your intern year, it’s mostly how do you manage surgical patients? How do you safely pre-op patients and clear them for surgery? How do you know when it’s safe to send somebody home after surgery? What does postoperative care look like for any types of surgery?

(08:39):
So I rotated with orthopedic surgery, trauma surgery, ophthalmology, oculoplastics, ENT, kind of all the subspecialties, but primarily general surgery and plastic surgery. So after your intern year, you kind of have the basics of patient care down. And then second year when you really do get to start operating and learning the foundations to surgical skills, and it’s a graduated autonomy at my program. So as you show that you can move to the next step in a surgical case and you’re granted a little bit more autonomy in those cases. And then after your second year, you’re primarily plastic surgery, you move more and more into almost a teaching capacity towards the end where you help junior residents with consults or cases and walk them through cases.

Eva Sheie (09:21):
So by the end, you’re actually teaching people who’ve come in behind you.

Dr. Kuruvilla (09:24):
Yes, yes.

Eva Sheie (09:27):
Do you find that you learn as much from teaching it as you did from being the student in the first place?

Dr. Kuruvilla (09:32):
Oh, absolutely. I think it’s a whole other ball game to being assisted or being the assistant. I think you have to know the procedure a lot better to be a good assistant, if that makes sense. So when I was younger or in my more junior years, my attendings were just making me look good. They were that good. They knew how the surgery went and how to make it easier for me. And I think it takes a lot of reflecting or self-reflection to know how to teach somebody to do the procedure as opposed to, you almost can go into an autopilot when you know a procedure really well, but then to be conscious and be able to articulate the steps to somebody is I think a whole other skill.

Eva Sheie (10:15):
Sounds like Montessori school.

Dr. Kuruvilla (10:17):
Yeah. That’s hilarious.

Eva Sheie (10:20):
Did someone else say that?

Dr. Kuruvilla (10:21):
Yeah. Dr. Basu has been saying his fellowship was like a Montessori fellowship.

Eva Sheie (10:27):
That’s funny that he said that.

Dr. Kuruvilla (10:28):
I know.

Eva Sheie (10:29):
We’ve never had that conversation. Fast forward a little. How did you meet Dr. Basu and how did you end up being invited to join the practice?

Dr. Kuruvilla (10:37):
I feel so fortunate. My husband, so he was finishing his fellowship. He did a four year neurology residency and then a two year fellowship in epilepsy. So we were both had six years of training at Virginia. We knew we wanted to come back to Houston, we love Texas. And so my priority was Houston and I was just looking on the job boards and I saw that Dr. Basu had a job opening and he’s very well known through ASPS and in the plastic surgery world. And so I applied to the job and I remember he emailed me saying, say hello to your chair. He knew my chair very well, which I had no idea about. And my chair was a great sponsor for all of us residents and great mentor. And so he talked to Dr. Basu about me a little bit. I interviewed with them and Dr. Basu asked me if I was willing to complete his aesthetic surgery fellowship. And I said, absolutely. And so here I am.

Eva Sheie (11:28):
Welcome home.

Dr. Kuruvilla (11:29):
Yeah. Feels so good.

Eva Sheie (11:31):
Are there procedures that you’re particularly passionate about that now that you’re in private practice that you’re going to focus on?

Dr. Kuruvilla (11:39):
Yeah, I think I really resonate with mommy makeover patients. I have two children. I have a almost six month old now, and I can really appreciate just how much when you don’t feel like yourself in that postpartum and how much being able to fit in your old clothes can really affect your quality of life and how you show up for people in your life and how you show up for your children. So I feel like I really resonate with those patients. Tailing on along to that, even the body conjuring patients, so patients that have or massive weight loss patients, so patients who have lost a whole bunch of weight and done all that hard work and now just want to get the cherry on top and be able to buy their new wardrobe. I enjoy massive weight loss patients. I also gravitate a lot to one of my mentors in residency who was actually performing migraine surgery, which is kind of a funny overlap with my husband.

(12:29):
And we’ve had a lot of fun discussions over dinner about the role of migraine surgery and treatment of migraines.

Eva Sheie (12:35):
I bet you have.

Dr. Kuruvilla (12:36):
Yeah. But he’s a believer. So that’s something new that I’m bringing to the practice. There are simple procedures, and I know we’re going to do a whole other podcast on that. So without going into too much detail, just trigger site decompression for migraine surgery. I love breast augmentation within the mommy makeover. I also am getting additional training in Labiaplasty because I think that’s a super important procedure that helps from a hygienic view and fits the whole mommy makeover picture. I love all of it, but hopefully going to really resonate with them while we makeover patients.

Eva Sheie (13:09):
So exciting.

Dr. Kuruvilla (13:09):
Thank you.

Eva Sheie (13:10):
Migraine surgery, I mean of anything that one can really truly save lives.

Dr. Kuruvilla (13:18):
Yes. Oh, absolutely. The amount of days lost at work, money that has been put towards medications and chronic treatment of it correctly selected patient. I think it can make a huge difference.

Eva Sheie (13:30):
Yeah, I look forward to talking with you more about that one. Well, what do you like to do with your littles outside of work?

Dr. Kuruvilla (13:36):
So both of our families are from Houston, so we’re just constantly spending time with family, which has been lovely, making up a lot for lost time. We have a dog, so we’re big in finding good dog parks and going on walks. We enjoyed hiking back in Virginia. We have yet to find a place in Houston to go hiking. It’s mostly going for walks, picnics, exploring outside, seeing family. We play a lot of soccer in our house, but trying to just keep ’em outside as much as possible.

Eva Sheie (14:05):
And are you far from Cypress? How’s your commute going to be?

Dr. Kuruvilla (14:08):
It’s not too bad. I am just under 25 minutes away. I live in the memorial area just because I wanted to be close to my family. We’re a block away from my mother-in-law, which has been really awesome.

Eva Sheie (14:20):
I bet she’s really happy to have you back.

Dr. Kuruvilla (14:21):
Yes, yes.

Eva Sheie (14:22):
Yeah, that’s great. If someone’s coming for a consultation with you, what should they expect from that first meeting?

Dr. Kuruvilla (14:29):
They should expect to feel very much heard and appreciated and feel like I will uphold their goals and their voice. And I really want it to be kind of the shared decision making process between the two of us. They present to me the goal that they want to achieve, and I do my best to safely get them there, but I do want them just to feel very comfortable with me and really know that I really do care about their safety, but also just their wellbeing and whatever procedure can achieve for them.

Eva Sheie (14:58):
If someone is interested in coming for a consultation or getting to know you better, how should they reach out?

Dr. Kuruvilla (15:04):
So they can call our front office and ask to schedule a consultation with me, Shannon Kuruvilla, or they can DM us on Instagram @Basuplasticsurgery, and somebody should get back to them quickly.

Eva Sheie (15:17):
They will. They’re actually really good at that.

Dr. Kuruvilla (15:19):
Yes, they are.

Eva Sheie (15:20):
Yes. Well, it was a pleasure to meet you today, and I’m so glad that you got your first podcast out of the way here.

Dr. Kuruvilla (15:27):
Thank you for getting me through it.

Eva Sheie (15:28):
And we will have you back again for many more.

Dr. Kuruvilla (15:32):
Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Announcer (15:40):
Basu Plastic Surgery is located in Northwest Houston in the Towne Lake area of Cypress. To learn more about the practice or ask a question, go to basuplasticsurgery.com/podcast. On Instagram follow Dr. Basu and the team @BasuPlasticSurgery. That’s BASU Plastic Surgery. Behind the Double Doors is a production of The Axis, theaxis.io.