Saw this little item in the Gambit this morning:

Dr Michael DeBakey, legendary surgeon, professor and inventor, was honored with the Congressional Gold medal, the highest award the U.S. Congress gives a civilian. The 99-year-old Debakey grew up in Lake Charles and earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from Tulane University. later, he helped develop the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) that saved thousands of lives during the Korean and Vietnam wars, invented several medical devices and surgical procedures, and was a pioneer in cardiovascular surgery.

...and I was instantly transported back in time to my childhood spent, in part, in laboratories where I sat in either my dad's office or at my mother's desk after school or on odd days when there was no school for me. Dad worked at Baylor College of Medicine and headed his own pharmacology lab, while Mom worked as a research technician and did some lab hopping working for other PhDs at Baylor and the University of Texas' Medical Center. And yes, if you want to know, my parents met in a lab at Baylor and have been together ever since.

Dad's lab was in one of the newer buildings at Baylor, on one of the topmost floors, just down the hall from the Sleep Disorders Lab. My mother's changes of jobs took her to other places around Houston's medical center, among them the then-newly built Michael E. DeBakey Center for Biomedical Education and Research. Near its first floor elevator banks, a huge portrait of Doc DeBakey looked out at all the researchers, staff and myself as we waited. He stood in a pose similar to the one below:

...and he had an air of a commanding elder about him, lent still more authority by his scrubs and his surgical mask, items of his profession that said he was still a force to be reckoned with. Back then, he was inching closer to his eighties, but that huge portrait by the elevators emanated strength and wisdom that transcended his age. "I may look like a grandfather," it said, "but I have the power to save your life, and I'm working on it every day."

I had no clue, until seeing that item in the weekly, that DeBakey was born in Louisiana, and studied and practiced in New Orleans. I had no idea he was born with the last name of Dabachi, had Lebanese ancestry, and interned at Charity Hospital. It seems that my mother was not only changing jobs when she went from Baylor to UT at one point, she was unwittingly moving from one side of a longtime feud to another. And, when I attended an arts magnet high school in Houston shortly before we moved to Central PA, the only way in which we students thought of the DeBakey High School for Health Professions was as another cream-of-the-crop public school in the area that we were academically competing against whether we knew it or not.

Hell, I had no idea the man was still alive and kicking. He very nearly almost wasn't.

Suffice it to say that I didn't know, until this morning, what an effect Dr DeBakey has had on my life in so many inadvertent ways. What more can I do but embrace this strange confluence of events? How can I really knock a man who gives such sage advice as the following?:

Okra is the key to good gumbo.

Damn, right, Doc.

Here's hoping that your ticker will keep on ticking into your 100th year. Mazel tov on that medal.