{"id":1051,"date":"2017-06-20T21:17:19","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T21:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2017-06-20T21:17:19","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T21:17:19","slug":"mending-broken-hearts-profile-heart-surgeon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/2017\/06\/20\/mending-broken-hearts-profile-heart-surgeon\/","title":{"rendered":"Mending Broken Hearts: A Profile of a Heart Surgeon"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alexandra<\/a>

Alexandra Godfrey, PA-C, practices emergency medicine in North Carolina.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cResilience makes space for feelings. It\u2019s different from depersonalization\u2014something that we see in medicine today. The depersonalized response to tragedy is \u2018too bad, so sad, get on with it.\u2019 Depersonalized physicians believe feelings are too risky and painful, so they can\u2019t imagine that feelings exist in others.\u201d\u2014Ross Ungerleider, MD<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ross Ungerleider, pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon at Driscoll Children\u2019s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, is ranked in the top one percent of his specialty and has for the past twelve years been listed as one of America\u2019s best doctors. Over the course of his 40-year career, he has repaired the hearts of more than 6,000 children.<\/p>\n

Ungerleider\u2019s office is a shrine to children with congenital heart defects. Children\u2019s cards and paintings cover the walls, leaving his awards stacked along the baseboards. Textbooks he\u2019s written sit beside a model heart, and a box filled with artificial valves occupies the coffee table.<\/p>\n

I ask, \u201cHow many heart surgeries are too many?\u201d<\/p>\n

He looks me in the eye. \u201cEvery single one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ungerleider\u2019s journey began when his mother took him as a child to the Chicago Roosevelt Museum (now the Museum of Science and Industry). There he saw an enormous model of the human heart with patches and valves lowered into it on strings like a complicated marionette.<\/p>\n

His fascination was not just scientific. His parents were divorcing, and he was trying to understand the collapse of his family.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was amazed by how orderly and precise it all looked,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Ungerleider as a child<\/p><\/div>\n

For ten-year-old Ross, the model made sense of broken hearts.<\/p>\n

Years later, the summer before he left for college at Wesleyan University, his stepfather was killed in a tragic accident. \u201cA divorce is devastating,\u201d he says. \u201cIt makes it harder to relate to the people you love because they\u2019re not in the same place and may say awful things about each other. But they\u2019re still there. I understand the permanence of death. I never take lightly the fear of the parents of\u00a0the children I operate on.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day that his mother drove him to college, they heard a song on the radio \u2014 Tony Bennett\u2019s hauntingly beautiful \u201cWho Can I Turn To?\u201d His mother looked into his grieving eyes and said, \u201cI\u2019ll find that record and send it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a crisp New England morning a month into his undergraduate studies, he received a call telling him that his mother had unexpectedly died. Stunned and numb, he went home for the funeral. When he returned to campus, \u201cI was walking across the football field, looking at the stars and wondering, what would become of me? How was I going to make it? \u201c<\/p>\n

The next morning, he received a package in the mail \u2014 \u201cWho Can I Turn To?\u201d Mailing that record had been one of the last things his mother ever did.<\/p>\n

Ungerleider now believes that his mother died of Broken Heart Syndrome. Shortly after her death, his English professor read out loud an excerpt from the Yeats poem, \u201cThe Circus Animals’ Desertion.\u201d As he read, \u201cI must lie down…in the foul rag and bone shop of\u00a0the heart,\u201d the professor went to the window, raised it to take a deep breath, and said, \u201cYou are all too young to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Ungerleider understood.<\/p>\n

He graduated from Wesleyan University with a major in English, a thesis in biology, and highest honors. It was 1970. The Vietnam War was raging, and the draft caused a surge in applications to medical school, making admissions far more competitive. Like his peers, he was afraid that his dreams would be shattered. He watched a friend throw a chair at the television when his number was called.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Ungerleider operating in Panama<\/p><\/div>\n

Ungerleider was accepted into medical school on his third attempt, landing at Rush University in Chicago. After medical school, he went into the CT surgery training program at Duke, helping start\u00a0Duke’s pediatric heart program in 1986.\u00a0He spent 23 years at Duke, first as a resident and later as faculty. He subsequently worked in Oregon, Ohio, North Carolina, and finally Texas. Through hard work, determination, and trial and error, he became an expert in heart defects with special expertise in aortic valve surgery.<\/p>\n

Ungerleider believes that his parents’ divorce, followed by the loss of his stepfather and then his mother while he was still so young, gave him the resilience to withstand failure and the empathy needed to care for patients \u2014 probably two of the most important skills needed\u00a0in medicine today.<\/p>\n

As a child in Chicago, Ungerleider had been mesmerized by the soft, incessant \u201club, dub,\u201d of the model heart in the museum. And looking back now, he recognizes that the exhibit highlighted major breakthroughs in the management of congenital heart defects. Heart-lung bypass had just become a reality.<\/p>\n

But at the time, \u201cI only knew that, if I became one of these surgeons,\u201d he says, \u201cI could fix the broken hearts of other kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Register<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cResilience makes space for feelings. It\u2019s different from depersonalization\u2014something that we see in medicine today. The depersonalized response to tragedy is \u2018too bad, so sad, get on with it.\u2019 Depersonalized physicians believe feelings are too risky and painful, so they can\u2019t imagine that feelings exist in others.\u201d\u2014Ross Ungerleider, MD Ross Ungerleider, pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[276,421,423],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-editors","category-uncategorized","tag-empathy","tag-pediatric-cardiothoracic-surgery","tag-resilience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1285"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/frontlines-clinical-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}