To Hold a Human Heart
Michael Carmichael
Chief of cardiovascular surgery/medical director, Bethesda Memorial Hospital
The heart is a muscle, so it feels very firm and beefy. It’s like you’re grabbing someone’s bicep after they’ve worked out. Most people don’t realize it, but the heart also is covered with a thin layer of fat tissue that gives it a cushion while it’s beating in the chest.
But that’s from a purely clinical and medical perspective. From a personal standpoint, it feels like an obligation. As a cardiovascular surgeon, [patients literally] put their heart in my hands. It’s a humbling responsibility.
Though we do heart surgery with less risk than having your ruptured appendix removed, people think about life and death a lot more when they have a heart operation. It goes back to biblical times; the heart is referred to as the center of the soul. If you remove somebody’s heart and put in somebody else’s, people want to know: Is it going to change my personality? Is it going to change the color of my hair? My eyes? It’s not just, “Oh, you’re going to operate on this muscle in my chest.” It’s much more than that.
I did my first heart transplant when I was 32 [Note: Carmichael is in his early 60s now]. In those early days, I would actually harvest the heart right from the donor and bring it back for the recipient. That was a very scary experience. [Today,] the donor heart [arrives] in an Igloo cooler where it’s bathed in ice, and then I sew it in.
But [there’s a period of time where] you have somebody’s chest cavity open—and there’s no heart in there. It’s an empty chest cavity. To then see the blood return to that organ that was basically limp and lifeless … to watch it start beating again. … To see the patient sitting up in the chair the next week … Just thinking about it, it wells up in me.
What does it feel like to hold someone’s heart? It’s a physical thing. It’s an emotional thing. It’s a psychological thing. And it’s a spiritual thing. If you don’t believe in God, you certainly might after performing heart surgery.
To me, it’s a religious experience.
