Julian had to live in the heart unit for two months without leaving, and my son
and I would take him food every day so he’d have a little touch of home while
he was in there. He got little sleep, little rest of any kind, and he had to know
everything about his 60 immediate post-operative patients. When Dr. Michael
DeBakey – the most famous heart surgeon in the country, the inventor of the
heart-lung machine that enabled open-heart surgery – came into the unit, he
expected the resident to walk around the unit with him and to know every test
result for every one of those 60 patients. If not, he would fire them immediately.
So there was intense pressure. At least one resident killed himself while Julian was
in training. They’ve changed the way they work now, but the whole thing was
just unbelievable.
It informed the way that I felt when we started the College of Medicine here
at FSU: the way we do our admissions, the way we do our clerkship training,
our focus on compassion and so forth. We want our students to have compassion
in the way they treat each other and the way they treat their patients. If we
don’t treat our students with compassion, how can we expect them to treat their
patients that way? That’s the way I felt watching Julian’s training. On one hand,
I understood why they trained them that way. Julian and his fellow residents,
when they came out of there, could have been on a battlefield with bullets flying
and still been able to make life-and-death decisions because they were trained
under battlefield conditions. If they lived through it, it was good. Not all of them
were able to live through it, though. And it was horrible to watch. Julian lived
through it but, my God, the toll on some of them was intense. They needed to
have a support team, and not all the wives were capable of providing that.
We moved from Houston to Kansas, where Julian got a residency in cardiopulmonary
surgery to finish his training. By that time we had our daughter Lilly.
I had Lilly while I was a postdoc and Julian was finishing residency. And then we
had our daughter Samantha while we were up in Kansas City. So we were finishing
up family while we were moving around the United States, and then we
moved here to Tallahassee at the end of that residency, and Julian moved here to
go into practice with his senior surgeon from residency training. Another reason
we moved here was that I knew Bob Reeves. Bob had been on my doctoral committee
in Memphis in the micro department. When I got here, he was director of
the Program in Medical Sciences at FSU. And I thought that perhaps, because I
knew Bob, I could get a position in the biology department or a position of some
kind at Florida State – which was a stupid thing for Myra to think. But guess
what? It worked out.
First Penny Gilmer, who was in the biochemistry department, called me
up and said, “Myra, there is a new National Science Foundation grant called
a Visiting Professorship for Women award that you would qualify for. Would
you like to come write a grant proposal to work in my lab?” Well, I went and
talked to her, and I couldn’t understand what she thought I could do in her lab.
But later on, this all would make sense. One day at Bob Reeves’ house I met Bill
18 | Breaking the Mold