Co-Anchor Goes To Work With Dad

Empowering slogans like "girl power" and "girls rule" are just one way of reminding our daughters to reach for the sky.

Today is the 8th annual Take Our Daughters To Work Day, created as a way to expose girls to nontraditional careers.

In honor of the day, Early Show Co-Anchor Jane Clayson went to work with her father, Dr. Karl Clayson, a vascular surgeon in Sacramento, Calif.

The patient was William Eldridge. He and his wife, Dee, agreed to let The Early Show's cameras follow him through an operation to remove the plaque clogging an artery in his neck.

The surgery is recommended, explains Dr. Clayson, because statistics suggest that the plaque puts Eldridge at a significantly increased risk of stroke.

For nearly 25 years, Dr. Clayson has been in the business of saving lives, and he has performed nearly 7,000 surgeries.

Co-Anchor Clayson asked her father if he gets nervous before performing surgery.

"I don't get nervous any more. I try and be very cautious and not overconfident or overly cocky," he says. "But after you do a fair number, you have a confidence level that everything will go very well."

The first thing daughter Clayson learned was that surgeons scrub for a full 10 minutes before slipping into sterile gowns and gloves. The big surprise, though, was how hard it is to breathe through a surgical mask.

The mask made her sleepy and she remarked that it's a good thing she was not the surgeon.

"The general policy," her father quipped drily, "is the patient stays asleep and the surgeons and the anesthesiologist stay awake. That's kind of what we try and do in this case."

But later in the procedure, Clayson pleased her father by using the term "connective tissue."

"I'm impressed," said the surgeon. "I've got nursing students that don't know that."

After an hour of careful maneuvering, the dangerous blockage was exposed.

"It's about what I thought it would be. It's always pretty yucky," said Dr. Clayson.

"Yucky? Is that a clinical term?" teased his daughter.

Afterward, Clayson commented with pride that she watched for two hours as her father made his way through the human body with extraordinary skill -- "the same guy who made me stick to curfew and take out the trash became this incredible maestro of a perfectly orchestrated routine."

By the end of the day, Clayson was telling her father that she had learned a new appreciation for the human body by accompanying him to work.

"Can I come to work with you next year?" she asked.

And her father replied, "I thought when I retired I could come to work as your assistant at CBS."