UF Health Cancer Center - Orlando Health

ORLANDO - Richard Klein was a bit of a globetrotter as a child, so perhaps it is not surprising that two of the most important events in his adult life, professionally and personally, required him to traverse two oceans.

Before learning more about those pivotal journeys, it is instructive to know that as a youngster Klein, now 47 and the section chief of the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Center at the UF Health Cancer Center Orlando Health, had a family history that might be worthy of a textbook about mid-20th-century immigration geography.

Klein’s father’s family were Hungarian Jews who settled in Chile after escaping the Nazis just before World War II. Klein’s mother was born in China to a Chinese mother and a Dutch father. As World War II ended, they fled Shanghai to avoid the Communist takeover. After a couple of nomadic years, the family settled in the newly created state of Israel. That is where Klein’s father, who was visiting the Mideast, met his mom. They married and moved to Santiago, which is where Klein and his two older sisters were born.

But, once again, the family chose to relocate when socialists took over Chile in 1968. They moved to Switzerland, but it was an uneasy time in Europe. “There was a lot of political intrigue there in the 1970s,” said Klein. “That’s when terrorism really began, with hijacking of planes and killing Olympic athletes. When we traveled we were very careful to never fly over a hostile country because my mother had an Israeli passport and we did not want to have to land in the wrong country and just disappear,” he remembered.

The family made yet another new start when they moved to northern California in 1980. Klein was only 14 and he already had lived on three continents. But no matter where he called home, his dream to become a physician, specifically a surgeon, never dimmed. “I always had an interest in medicine and I was always busy building things with my hands,” he said.

After graduating from Santa Clara University, Klein spent a year in Switzerland doing medical research and developed an interest in international healthcare. He returned to the U.S. and earned his MD and a Masters of Public Health concurrently at Tufts University in Boston.

Klein completed his internship and general surgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. It was then that plastic surgery began to fascinate him, Klein said, “because it is just so different than other surgeries. There’s creativity and lots of three-dimensional thinking. No two problems are the same.”

Klein headed farther north to accept a four-year research fellowship in trauma/burn surgery at the University of Michigan. A three-year residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery followed.

Klein was in private practice in McLean, Va., for a couple of years when he got a call from his former department chairman at the University of Michigan, David Smith, MD, who was now chairman of surgery at the University of South Florida School of Medicine in Tampa. After three years in that academic setting, Klein was invited in 2008 by former USF colleague Kenneth Lee, MD, to join him at what was then MD Anderson Cancer Center in Orlando. “(Lee) wanted to do complex reconstruction, and for that type of surgery you really need to have a partner because if things go wrong, you need to have a backup and no one else here knew how to do microsurgery,” said Klein.

Atlantic Turning Point

It was a trip across the Atlantic two years ago that was a professional turning point for the well-traveled Klein. He went to Paris to study with Corrine Becker, MD, who is world-renowned for pioneering Vascularized Lymph Node Transplant (VLNT) surgery. The microsurgical technique gives sufferers of lymphedema, a chronic condition that causes massive swelling of the extremities, an option to relieve their pain and discomfort, which often follows treatment and surgery for breast cancer. It involves removing healthy lymph nodes from another part of the body and inserting them into the area that has lymphedema.

Klein returned to Orlando from Paris and trained his partners, Lee, and Jeffrey Feiner, MD, and now they are among a handful of surgeons in the U.S., and the only ones in Florida, he said, who regularly perform this delicate, ground-breaking microsurgery.

Before he did the first VLNT 18 months ago, Klein said about 20 percent of his breast reconstruction patients had lymphedema, and “there wasn’t much we could do for them other than a dramatic surgery that could be pretty disfiguring.” Today, Klein said, more than half of the approximately 500 patients who come to his practice every month are seeking consultation or treatment for lymphedema, and almost 20 percent of those are traveling here from states as far away as California, Texas and New York.

The impact Klein and his partners have created at UF Health Cancer Center Orlando Health is not lost on President Mark Roh, MD. “One of the things I respect most about Richard is that he is a brilliant surgeon, but he’s always interested in learning and trying new things to help his patients,” Roh said. “(Regarding) lymphedema … he saw that his patients had very few options for relief and he took it upon himself to learn a cutting-edge procedure, to go to Europe and bring VLNT back to Florida. What he has done since then is absolutely amazing. He’s changed the lives of so many of his patients because of his commitment to being the best surgeon he can be,” said Roh.

In addition to VLNT, Klein is sought after for other breast reconstruction surgeries, including an advanced technique called DIEP flaps. (DIEP stands for the deep inferior epigastric perforator artery, which runs through the abdomen.) “We use microsurgery to reconstruct the breast using the patient’s own tissues,” said Klein.

Pacific Turning Point

A few years before, a turning point in Klein’s personal life took him across the Pacific to the Republic of Vietnam. That is where he and his wife went – twice in 18 months – to adopt their sons. They were 6 months old when they brought them home, and now they are 7 and 6 years old. “We wanted to give an opportunity to children who wouldn’t have one otherwise,” Klein said. “It was a wonderful experience. The Vietnamese people were extremely friendly. We felt very welcome.”

Klein, a former private pilot with a fascination about air travel, shares with his sons his 30-year hobby of using balsa wood to build remote control airplanes. The family also enjoys going to air shows.

Klein’s wife is a nurse anesthetist at Florida Hospital Orlando. Klein met her at the University of Michigan and she, too, has an international history. She grew up in the Czech Republic. Between them, they speak five languages: English, Spanish, French, Czech and Russian.