Heart in Hand
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491_9780738806693
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This book is about the nature of life, as I see it. I offer my reflections on a wide variety of subjects: on sex, death, love, God, and the importance of music, and art in general, in our lives.I am a heart surgeon. For the last 25 years I have lived in Seattle, practicing and teaching heart surgery at the University of Washington and at Swedish Medical Center. Several things happened during these years that led me to write this book. First there was an untimely death. My sister Nancy died in 1978 when she was 31 years old, from breast cancer. I was 38 years old at the time. Then, six years later, I was changing out my scrub clothes in the surgeons locker room after doing a coronary bypass operation on an elderly woman and talking with a surgical colleague, Dr. Alfred Blue, when he happened to notice a mole on my unclothed shoulder. He said, pointing to the mole on my shoulder, how long have you had that thing? Dr. Blue is an outspoken, no nonsense plastic surgeonqualities usually not seen in that breed of physician. I told him that it had been there for awhile and that one of the other surgeons on the staff looked at it a year ago and said that it was nothing to worry about. Dr. Blue said, in his usual blunt fashion, it oughta come off. He excised it in his office later that afternoon. Much to my surprise, and his, for that matter, it turned out to be cancera malignant melanoma. I went back to his office a few days later and he did a wide excision of the skin, fatty tissue, and lymph nodes around the site under local anesthesia. While he was cutting away a large pizza-sized wedge of skin and subcutaneous tissue from my shoulder, Dr. Blue made a comment that forever after endeared him to me. He said, Im glad youre the one whose got this problem and not me! The reader might think that this statement is a bit crass, an unfeeling thing for a doctor to say to his patient. But I took comfort in what he said and looked at it this way: one does not often e
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