In third grade, I wrote a fan letter to Dr. Michael E. DeBakey.
That sentence alone is baggy with implications: In 1964, there were actually doctors famous for being wonderful, as opposed to now, when we have Kervorkian and Phil. In 1964, medicine was still magical, not just another corporate field best avoided. And in 1964, my mother was doing a bang-up job pushing me toward a career in medicine.
Dozens of factors contributed to my becoming the esteemed cardiologist I am not today. DeBakey, who died Friday at age 99, wasn't one of them.
My letter was, according to family lore, oppressively cute in all its barely legible, science-y curiosity about the artificial heart. The prospect of their son dedicating his life to sloshing around chest cavities impelled my parents to spring for an airmail stamp, and off to Houston the letter flew. The response flew back to Queens just as fast. Yes, that's right. DeBakey, the superstar heart surgeon who was doing stuff like boosting an artery from a patient's leg and reassigning it to the same patient's thorax, took the time to write back.
DeBakey thanked me for my interest in his work and included literature featuring unbelievably cool photos of the surgically repaired gizzards deep inside some kind of cattle. I read the stuff like it was a collection of "Archie" comics.
The '60s media covered all of Debakey's exploits. His heart procedures ran neck and neck with the space race for national fascination. Somewhere above my head, there seemed to be some feud going on between him and another superstar surgeon named Denton Cooley. I took sides like it was Mets versus Yankees. Then a South African surgeon named Christiaan Barnard did a heart transplant on a man named Louis Washkansky. Yes, healthcare was such a turn-on then that I still remember the name of the first transplant patient. I was disappointed that this foreign doctor nudged DeBakey out of the scrubs limelight, but DeBakey was lavish in his praise of Barnard, so I went along.
After some dizzyingly hopeful post-op reports of his sitting up and talking, Washkansky died 18 days after his transplant. It felt like losing the World Series.
One day in 1969, my mother unexpectedly picked me up from junior high. What are you doing here? I asked. She said she was taking me to St. John's University to see a speech delivered by DeBakey. In a weird bit of reverse snobbery, I couldn't believe that DeBakey would come to New York.
