Don Elium came to Minneapolis, MN to give the Parenting Lecture for our annual Parenting Symposium sponsored by St. David's School in honor of our daughter Mandy, who died of SIDS at six months of age in 1991. Ann, my wife, and I took Don to dinner at the Table of Contents restaurant where we shared our stories of childhood, memories, beach stories, and our educational sagas. I then took Don to the Hyatt Hotel while Ann went home to prepare our children for bedtime. Don invited me to his room so he could show me some of the techniques ( BSFF-Be Set Free Fast by Larry Nims, Ph.D. ) which he feels are effective in his practice in Walnut Creek, CA (San Francisco Bay Area.)

He started by defining some general terms and then explained that we would be working together to eliminate as best we could "all the emotional roots and deepest causes" of pain and distress I felt.

I cannot precisely re-reconstruct all the topics we discussed in that evening two to three hour time together, but we talked considerably about my insecurities in certain aspects of cardiac surgery, my slowness and tendency to depressive rumination and punishing perfectionism. We talked about my pain and professional development arrest associated with losing Mandy, and that the tragedy occurred at the exact time I was in transition form one surgical practice group to another--and thus arrived in the new group seriously wounded. And this woundedness has continued to be an ongoing problem in relating to my partners in spite of my relatively senior position in the group at present. Don helped me worked through much of this feeling of insecurity, hesitancy and frustration toward my partners.

As we talked a while about lingering hostility toward a prior spouse and removed all the "emotional roots and deepest causes" of those feelings.

Over the course of that discussion I lost all track of time. I became progressively more fatigued, which I sense shared with Don. But with the feeling of pleasant fatigue I clearly felt lighter and even slowly developed a sense of euphoria. I walked out of Don's room feeling very, very different and almost drugged, which I felt could be rationally explained by the late hour, fatigue and deep concentration for several hours. Yet I felt a new and different sense of self-confidence and power.

The next day I requested time off from my surgical practice so that I could attend a workshop Don was doing at St. David's School and to take him to lunch with Ann and the executive director of St. David's School. However, I had to change my plans when I was asked to attend an early morning Chest Tumor Conference, since none of my partners could attend and date were to be presented on several patients I had operated on.

At the conclusion of the conference I was walking out of the hospital with one of our nurse clinicians who received a STAT page. The STAT page informed her that a patient upon whom I had performed a five vessel coronary artery bypass two days before had abruptly started bleeding and was in shock. None of my partners were within twenty to thirty minutes of that hospital. When I called the patient's nursing station I was told that his blood pressure had dropped from 110 to 48. I instructed the ward nurses to bring the patient directly to the operating room, realizing that he may not survive to get into OR.

When he arrived into the operating room I was scrubbed and gowned. The patient appeared moribund but recognized my voice as I spoke to him. I assured him that we would care for him. I was able to promptly stop bleeding from a bypass graft but while doing so watched the development of a clot form in all the venous bypass grafts which I had done two days earlier. I made a hasty decision--counter to the judgment of a partner who had just arrived to assist me--to place the patient back on the heart-lung machine. His heart stopped just as I was ready to start the bypass pump and luckily did not require massage of his arrested heart which would probably have resulted in irreversible delivery of clotted blood throughout the circulatory system of the heart. He left the operating room alive although quite sick.

In all the urgency in the operating room I experienced sadness that I could not be at the activities as planned with Don. Yet, I felt a sense of peace, clarity of thinking and rapid decisiveness which I can never remember feeling--this tremendously positive and supportive feeling produced tranquility in my mind amid life challenging urgency. In particular the decisive decision to commit to return to bypass saved his life, and it was this specific difficulty with such issues we had worked on together the night before. I left that operating room thanking God and really feeling that Don Elium had played a major role in saving that patient's life. And, I also marveled at the irony that I had been present, when my plans had been to be elsewhere, and all of my partners were at other hospitals.

Twelve days later this patient was slowly recovering although remained quite ill. He was transferred out of the intensive care unit on the tenth day after his emergency operation.

My heartfelt thanks and love to Don Elium's teaching and caring for my wounds.

Addendum: Six weeks after surgery and in spite of his multiple complications, the patient is now at home doing well. He has no incisional discomfort or any complaints. He currently has less post-operative complaints or problems than most routine cardiac surgical patients. I think this entire case is amazing.

John Winston Overton, Jr. M.D.

Cardiothoracic Surgeon Minneapolis, MN

Be Set Free Fast Cardiac Surgery by John Winston Overton, Jr. M.D. Cardiothoracic Surgeon Minneapolis, MN Copyright 2006, The BSFF Everyday Freedom eMagazine