This NY Sunday Times story by Lawrence K. Altman, MD reports that one of Houston’s greatest surgeons continues to be on the cutting edge of surgical and related medical issues even as he approaches 100 years of age:

In late afternoon last Dec. 31, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, then 97, was alone at home in Houston in his study preparing a lecture when a sharp pain ripped through his upper chest and between his shoulder blades, then moved into his neck.
Dr. DeBakey, one of the most influential heart surgeons in history, assumed his heart would stop in a few seconds. [. . .]
But when his heart kept beating, Dr. DeBakey suspected that he was not having a heart attack. As he sat alone, he decided that a ballooning had probably weakened the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart, and that the inner lining of the artery had torn, known as a dissecting aortic aneurysm.
No one in the world was more qualified to make that diagnosis than Dr. DeBakey because, as a younger man, he devised the operation to repair such torn aortas, a condition virtually always fatal. The operation has been performed at least 10,000 times around the world and is among the most demanding for surgeons and patients.
Over the past 60 years, Dr. DeBakey has changed the way heart surgery is performed. He was one of the first to perform coronary bypass operations. He trained generations of surgeons at the Baylor College of Medicine; operated on more than 60,000 patients; and in 1996 was summoned to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin, then the president of Russia, to aid in his quintuple heart bypass operation.
Now Dr. DeBakey is making history in a different way ó as a patient. He was released from Methodist Hospital in Houston in September and is back at work. At 98, he is the oldest survivor of his own operation, proving that a healthy man of his age could endure it. [. . .]
But beyond the medical advances, Dr. DeBakeyís story is emblematic of the difficulties that often accompany care at the end of life. It is a story of debates over how far to go in treating someone so old, late-night disputes among specialists about what the patient would want, and risky decisions that, while still being argued over, clearly saved Dr. DeBakeyís life.
It is also a story of Dr. DeBakey himself, a strong-willed pioneer who at one point was willing to die, concedes he was at times in denial about how sick he was and is now plowing into life with as much zest and verve as ever.
But Dr. DeBakeyís rescue almost never happened.

Read the entire fascinating story, which includes Dr. DeBakey’s frank admissions that death seemed like a reasonable alternative to the pain he was enduring, that he initially declined the surgery because he would rather die than risk becoming an invalid and that he went into denial as his condition deteriorated. It is a fascinating story about facing death by a man whose legacy is saving lives.