GRAND ROUNDS | Time for a Heart-to-Heart: Reflections on Life in the Face of Death

Location: UW Medical Center, Plaza Cafe A/B, 1959 NE Pacific St #110, Seattle, WA 98195

Abstract: Patience, will, hope, humor, self-belief, knowing, not knowing: the seven powers that end-stage and critical cardiac care patients have within their grasp but often don’t take advantage of during prolonged mentally and physically painful hospital stays. And social workers, techs, psychiatrists, fellows, residents, cardiologists, oncologists, other ologists, and surgeons alike can help encourage, inspire, and extract these powers in their patients, particularly those who are unable to benefit from them on their own.  Although these seven powers can all be difficult to extract, that is precisely (and ironically) what makes them so beautiful and so precious and what can well be the difference—and even the deciding factor—between life and death.  This lecture is largely based on one of the many insights author Bob Mitchell pondered during and after his 100-day hospital stay and subsequent twelve-hour heart and kidney transplant surgery.   

Biography: Bob Mitchell studied at Williams College, Columbia, and Harvard, where he earned a PhD in French and Comparative Literature.  He is a novelist, essayist, poet, memoirist, and heart and kidney transplant survivor.  Bob has published eleven books, including a recent memoir about his transplant surgery with a foreword by Larry King and an afterword by Dr. Jon A. Kobashigawa, upon which his lecture is largely based.