It’s summer, so I’m busy being a human being instead of a conductor. There’s a joke in there somewhere but it’s true. But because I’m looking at the world at large other things jump out at me, some of them very much part of the family history. So today I say goodbye to another world legend, one I never had the chance to meet, but who had a profound effect on my family.
Doctor DeBakey died today at the ripe old age of 99. He was almost single-handedly responsible for most of the progress in open-heart surgery over the past 60 years. Every time I hear that someone I know has undergone some kind of heart procedure, whether full surgery or stent surgery or whatever, I get to tell them the following story:
Way back in The Day my mother was a young nurse who had just graduated from Prairie View College down in Texas. This is the 1950s, mind, so Jim Crow was alive and well and her prospects for work were limited. Somehow she found herself working at Methodist Hospital down in Houston. She was noticed by DeBakey and given a job in his cardiac ward.
Did I mention this was Texas in the 1950s? Having a black woman be one of his chief nurses was not exactly the most socially acceptable move DeBakey ever made, and he caught a lot of sh*t for it, but he stuck with his guns. He thought my mom was a good nurse and he wanted her on his ward, and DeBakey generally got what he wanted. So that became my mom’s start in the medical profession. Not a bad way to begin, eh? Kinda like Sondheim – the first major show he ever worked on was West Side Story. Where do you go from there?
I’m sorry I never had the chance to meet Dr. DeBakey and remind him of his connection with my family. I’ve always kept up with him through the news. Now I’ll have to wait until my own transition before I get a chance to talk with him. Funny, there’s very little history of heart trouble in my family so I doubt (hope?) I’ll ever have my own chest cracked open, but you never know. If it does happen I’ll go into surgery chuckling.
RIP Doctor.