Dig A Hole: Dr. Michael DeBakey, the man who saved Jerry Lewis’ life

July 12th, 2008 by Scott Marks

In 1982 I was working the dispatch office for Cablevision in Oak Park, Illinois. The phone rang and instead of some irate jerk in Cicero shouting that his Playboy Channel was out it was my friend David Elliott. The call came in at around 7 am San Diego time, an unthinkable hour of the morning for the then childless Mr. Elliott.

My first thought was that a member of the family had taken ill and in a sense I was right. As soon as Dave heard my voice he hit me with, “Jerry had a heart attack.”

Dr. Michael DeBakey was Jerry’s personal physician. The two men met in 1970 when Dr. DeBakey joined the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Scientific Advisory Committee. From 1972 to 1991 Dr. DeBakey served on MDA’s board and had stayed on as MDA national vice president since then.

Jerry and the Doc quickly formed mutual admiration societies, each man carrying pictures of the other in their wallets. It was Dr. DeBakey who first diagnosed Jerry’s addiction to Percodan. During a 1978 visit to Houston, Jerry collapsed and Dr. DeBakey’s first thought was that he had a heart attack. X-Rays revealed an inordinately large bleeding ulcer which were masked by the pain killer Jerry had been addicted to. After two grueling weeks of spinal injections the ulcer showed signs of healing and it was Dr. DeBakey’s nurturing words that helped Jerry kick the Percodan habit.

The attack that Jerry suffered in 1982 was so sudden that it prevented Dr. DeBakey from personally performing the open heart surgery, although he did act as a consultant. In 1992, sawbones DeBakey was once again called upon to help rid Jerry of prostate cancer.

The last time Dr. DeBakey operated on Jerry was in 2002 to help cure the comic of chronic pain that had been plaguing him since he too a fall off a piano in 1965. Jerry landed on a steel microphone cable, and it left his spine hanging at 15/16ths of an inch. The doctor implanted in Jerry a a battery-powered pulse generator from Medtronic Inc., the device that he frequently joked could not only free him of pain, but open his garage door as well. When Lewis left the hospital five days later, he was able to walk unassisted down a 200-yard corridor.

Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, a man considered by many to be the world’s greatest surgeon, died Friday night just two months shy of his 100th birthday. Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital said DeBakey died of natural causes.

According to the Houston Chronicle, “Debakey was born in Lake Charles, La., on September 7, 1908, a month before Ford began making Model Ts and a quarter-century before the discovery of bacteria-fighting drugs. His genius helped shape surgery and health care as we know it. While still in medical school, he developed the roller pump for the heart-lung machine. DeBakey invented many of the procedures and devices — more than 50 surgical instruments — used to repair hearts and arteries today.”

His career spanned seven decades. In 1932, while still a student at Tulane University in New Orleans he created the roller pump, which would be a critical component of the heart-lung machine that helped make open-heart surgery possible.

DeBakey developed a number of new surgical procedures that now are standard in treating heart ailments and led many to consider him the father of modern cardiovascular surgery. During World War II, while serving in the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, DeBakey’s work led to the development of Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, better known as MASH units.

In 1953 he borrowed his wife’s sewing machine and fashioned the first artificial artery for repairing damaged arteries in a surgery he pioneered. In 1964 he was the first in his field to perform a coronary bypass.

A 1965 Time Magazine cover helped transform him into the celebrity doctor to the stars. In addition to Jerry, DeBakey worked on such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Wayne Newton, Aristotle Onassis, Danny Kaye, Boris Yeltsin, Sen. John Glenn and Wayne Newton in addition to global dignitaries the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan and U.S. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Earlier this year he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in April 2008 for his lifetime achievements in medicine.

Some of Jerry must have rubbed off on Dr. DeBakey, or was it the other way around? If DeBakey was displeased by the progress of a procedure, he would remark with an air of faint disgust, ”I am surrounded by incompetence,” a line echoed by Jerry on countless movie sets.

“At times he could act like the meanest man in the world. He didn’t let you breathe,” said Dr. John L. Ochsner of New Orleans, who trained under DeBakey and whose father, Dr. Alton Ochsner, was DeBakey’s mentor at Tulane University School of Medicine. “The thing that made him so mad all the time,” Ochsner said, ” was he was trying to conquer the world and every minute was so important to him. He didn’t have time for frivolity at all.”

Withour Dr. DeBakey, dacron arteries, arterial bypass operations, artificial hearts, heart pumps and heart transplants may not have become common procedures. Due to his tireless efforts, Dr. DeBakey received the 1969 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Expect an enormous outpouring of beatitudes tinged with sorrow on this year’s Telethon. It is only fitting that a man who knew so much about hearts managed to touch the hearts of millions of viewers every Labor Day.

Links:
MDA Telethon Photos