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| Dr. Bud Frazier |
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| Ava with Lisa and Rebecca (my sweet friends and Women Heart Leaders) |
Most of the children in our town started school last week. With the new year comes new dreams and possibilities. It made me think about the people in our children's life and what influences us to be who we are as people. Who knows which experiences give us that spark to help direct us where we need to be and how to get there? It's something I think about often because Ava is almost 7 and we have talks weekly about "what she wants to be when she grows up." It's our job as parents to see the potential in our children and direct them where to focus their interests.
Last week I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Bud Frazier, the doctor who has done more heart transplants than anyone in the world. He lives in Houston and runs a lab building heart pumps, operates on patients, and oversees their care. He was kind enough to meet with our heart group at Woman Heart. Dr. Frazier is a funny, gracious, humble man who told us about his experiences and his history. He's a guy you would walk past in the grocery store, blending in with the rest of us without any air of superiority. Getting to meet him was a gift. Knowing the accomplishments this man has made to medical science made me think he must have known his entire life what he wanted to do with his life. As we all found out, the most surprising thing about Dr. Bud Frazier is he could have become a dentist or Methodist Minister instead of world famous heart surgeon/inventor. It's all about the influences our children come across in their lives and their experiences. He looked at the world around him and saw a few career opportunities in front of him because of who influenced him.
Opportunities that come in life are sometimes unexpected. Some people get to do what they love as their career, while others search for finding their place in the world, some don't ever get motivated. Some people are able to take tragedy and spin it into something positive. What started out as a devastating football injury changed the course of Dr. Frazier's history. Is he had not been injured and had to retire his football jersey the world as we know it would have forever been changed for the worse. Why? Because this man sees a problem and took it upon himself to fix it and instead he changed the world of heart surgery, forever. He invented the heart pump!!!
What changed Dr. Frazier into thinking about a career in heart surgery? Surprisingly enough, it was procrastination of all things! He had a research project due and a friend offered his topic for both of them to write about. The project was about transplants in dogs, and Dr. Frazier became interested in them. He transplanted a spleen from one dog to another and took care of that dog every day for a year. He bonded with that dog and was very upset when the dog died one year later. Doing that project made him want to do transplants. He continued operating on thousands of people, getting to hear their stories and being a part of their lives. One 24 year old lady with two children was dying and was stuck in the hospital completely bedridden. She haunted Dr. Frazier because she wrote him everyday in the hospital asking to die. She got her transplant and is living a full, beautiful life 10 years later because Dr. Frazier cared for her, not as just a patient but as a person. Some of those people stayed with him. Like the boy who gave him the idea for creating a heart pump.
This Italian boy was 19 and dying. Dr. Frazier was operating on him with another surgeon and Dr. Frazier had his hand inside this boy's chest pumping on his heart when the boy opened his eyes and looked at him directly in his eyes. At that time a heart pump did not exist and the boy died after Dr. Frazier was pulled off of him because nothing could be done at that time to save this boy. But Dr. Frazier decided then to build a pump that would do what his hand could do. The rest is history. He really made it sound simple, he had a problem and he needed to build something to fix the problem. He made it sound as if he was working on car engines or something instead of hearts! He has to work with companies/manufacturers that are willing to build new heart pumps. That's easier said than done which is the biggest frustration he has with his life's work, finding people to build what he needs. But they aren't far away from designing a total artificial heart replacement which would revolutionize the way people can live with heart failure.
Some of us know from a very early age what we want to be. Others pick a career based on their talents. But a select few accidentally, miraculously find their calling. Ava could be the next person to invent something that changes tens of thousands of lives. But we'll never know our true potential unless we keep looking for it. Unless we help our children find their focus in this world. That doesn't stop when we become adults but it's something we all should strive to work on. Finding our place in the world. I'm still working on it...are you??
More information on Dr. O. "Bud" Frazier's work in link below.
http://www.texasheartinstitute.org/Research/Devices/
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