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A Declaration of War

continued

“Todd, will you challenge me?” he asked. “Heart disease has found a cure.”

Okay, slide the hook deep into my lip—I was intrigued. Of course, I had expected a bold statement from Dr. Lundell—anyone with his credentials surely had earned the right to plant a flag of knowledge—he was one of the first surgeons to operate on a beating heart. Of course he has earned the right to make a bold statement. And, without a bold statement, why would anyone want to write a book? But, why did he ask if I would challenge him?

We chatted a bit more on the phone. We set up a time to meet. And, I hung up the phone wondering if I had just bumped into something too good to be true. Can there really be a cure for heart disease?

Upon our initial face-to-face meeting, Dr. Lundell continued to surprise me. His demeanor is easily approachable, conversational, and even a bit laid-back—not something the average person would expect from a man who has helped shape cardiovascular medicine. He was direct, and without blinking, brilliantly recited statistical information that would ultimately bewilder the average person’s thought process.

It wasn’t until Dr. Lundell began speaking of his career history that I gained an insight that is rarely seen by most of us—the true meaning and responsibility doctors face when they take an oath. That day, I realized that medicine, at least in Dr. Lundell’s perspective, was much more than a career. It was his passion and his purpose.

Somewhere in the middle of Dr. Lundell’s statistical barrage about the cardiovascular epidemic our nation faces, he began reciting a story from his past—a story that quickly transformed a swarm of data into a personal mission statement. “Todd, I’ve saved many lives,” he said. “But, as many times as I’ve revived life, the heartache of losing a patient never becomes a simple statistic. And, I’ll be honest. As a doctor, you tend to hope that with time, you will be able to separate yourself emotionally from your patients. But, I couldn’t. When your own two hands are the last chance for a person to live, and then you walk out of surgery to look a family in the eyes and tell them the bad news, it’s haunting. It’s horrible. And, it’s especially horrible when you know that you could have saved that person’s life if you had met them a few years earlier. I was walking away from a family once, hearing them mourn my horrific news—a widow and her children had just lost a husband and a father—when I realized that my thinking was backward. I knew that I had to somehow change the way I practiced medicine. We can cure heart disease. So, why don’t we? That’s when I knew I had to reach people before they ended up on a table in front of me. That’s why I’m writing this book.”

Sitting across the table from Dr. Lundell when he spoke those words made me shiver. His sincerity, passion, and even frustration were glaringly obvious. Yet, as much as I wanted to jump up and yell, “Count me in! Let’s save some lives!” my skepticism took over. And,

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