-Let's just start with establishing
why you know so much about the heart.
Can you tell me just a little bit about yourself?
-Well, I like to think I'm an expert at the human heart
because I get to do something that no one else gets to do --
I get to touch the human heart every day.
It takes forever to train as a heart surgeon.
For me, if you add in all of my education
on top of my training, it's about a 17-year process.
-What is your connection to the heart?
Why did you choose to become a heart surgeon?
-There was one day when I was an intern
that simply changed my life.
So there I am minding my own business
and a nurse grabs me and she says,
"My God, you have to come with me right now.
You have to come to OR-7 right now."
She throws me into this OR
that was just complete chaos and in the middle
of the OR table is a patient
with their chest open and blood is shooting up like a fountain,
and there's a surgeon who turns to me and says,
I want you to reach in here and hold the heart,
hold it steady so I can put some stitches in,
'cause I have these huge hands.
I mean, I can palm a basketball with these hands
and I can hold down about 13 keys on a piano right?
So I reach in there
and they were the perfect size hands
to just hold the heart just so,
just steady so that he could put the stitches in.
And that was it for me.
And I thought, "Oh, my gosh, you know, I'm holding a heart.
This is incredible. And I'm saving a life.
Wham, this is it.
This is what I want to do the rest of my life."
-When you take a heart out of someone,
does it carry any of the residual characteristics
of the person that it was in?
-You know, I've done a lot of heart transplants
and those patients
are the most incredibly brave patients
that I've ever dealt with
because imagine having your heart taken out
and accepting the heart of another patient,
another person, another complete stranger
who is giving you this gift of life for no reason.
Patients often worry, you know, will I be the same
after she opens my chest?
Will I be whole again?
Will I be human again?
People go through that.
There's a great story.
I don't know if you remember Barney Clark;
he was the first person ever
to have an artificial heart put in.
So they are talking to his wife
and they're going through all of the discussion
of all the risks, all the things
that could potentially happen,
the complications with the procedure,
and when they finish talking to her,
she only asked the team, the surgical team one question,
she said, "If you do this surgery
and the replace my husband's heart
with a machine, will he be able to love me?"
That's what she asked.
Of all the things that she could've asked
about the competitions of the surgery,
she asked will he love me.
That is the power
that people equate between love and the human heart.
-Do you think emotions like love actually affect the heart?
-I absolutely know that that happens.
There is this amazing connection between the heart and the brain,
and we see this in a syndrome called broken-heart syndrome.
Patients have almost exactly the identical features
of a heart attack brought on by emotion.
Breaking up with a loved one,
the loss or death of a loved one,
a shock or a surprise.
And in broken-heart syndrome,
what we see is the upper part of the heart
contracting a lot and the lower part
not contracting or squeezing at all.
When we examine them, we find that everything's normal.
All the arteries are completely clean,
no evidence of coronary artery disease,
and it's simply this emotional shock
that has stunned the heart.
-Do you think working on the heart has changed your heart?
I mean, the way you look at life and the way you look at love?
-There was one, um, time, in particular.
I was just impervious emotionally and physically
and my heart was hard.
I had this shield, this full metal jacket
and I strapped that thing on every day and I went to work.
I was on the pediatric service.
I had to spend six months, uh, dealing with children
with congenital heart disease.
So this one baby, uh, that we operated on,
I actually stayed at that baby's bedside
for 11 straight days.
And, you know, there was no way
that this child was gonna make it.
It's tough story.
It's, uh, it's a hard story to talk about.
When that baby died, the, um,
the nurses did something incredible.
They...they took the baby out of the incubator
and let me hold the baby for the first time.
The whole 11 days I'd been taking care of that baby,
you know, I never touched that baby.
I never connected.
Well, why would I? I had my full metal jacket on.
My job was just to keep that baby alive.
It wasn't to touch that baby
or be connected to that baby in any way.
I had that hard heart, you know.
And then I did something that... [ Scoffs ]
that nearly broke me in two.
I took that child and I walked her down the hall
to her where her parents were and I gave her,
you know, to her mom
who couldn't be there when she died,
so that she could at least hold her
and have that time of grief.
And when you ask me if being a heart surgeon has changed me,
that one moment I realized
that I could take off that jacket,
that I could connect with a patient
and that I wouldn't break in two.
I keep telling people that time is so precious.
We're given a certain number of heartbeats.
You don't know how many you're going to get.
I don't know how many I'm gonna get,
so I really think you've got to
live every one of those to its fullest.
-Do you think the heart has any other function
than being this organ that drives the body?
-When I'm at a bedside of a patient who's dying
and they take those last few beats of their heart
and you watch a patient move between life and death,
there's something very definite, very distinct
that leaves their body when their heart stops
and they lose this essence of who they are.
And I would like to believe, and I do believe
that the essence of what leaves them is their soul
and that's why I feel that the soul resides
in the heart, because once the heart stops,
the soul is gone.
And I have no scientific proof of that,
but that's what I believe in my heart.
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