Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant
Medical Non Fiction
Date Published: 05-11-2021
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Exhale is the riveting memoir of a top transplant doctor who rode the
emotional rollercoaster of saving and losing lives—until it was time
to step back and reassess his own life.
EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
June 2016
Palo Alto, California
I“am writing to let you know that I’ll be leaving Stanford effective July 1.”
Send. No, not yet.
I studied the email again, reading and rereading what I had written in the middle of the previous night.
Sitting in my office at Stanford University on a bright Northern California morning, the sun was all the way up, and I would have given anything to be outside enjoying the beautiful morning. Maybe hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains or riding my bike up the Pacific Coast Highway. But instead I was stuck inside, trying desperately to get an email out of my outbox.
I needed to pause for a moment, to decide for sure that this was what I wanted to do after all these years, all this effort, all the careful crafting of my career. I looked around at the photos on my desk—of my father and mother on their wedding day, my wife Jackie when we were first dating, and the baptism of my younger daughter, Ava. I looked at the poem my older daughter, Hannah, had written in Kindergarten about what it meant to have me as her dad.
I turned back to the computer screen, framed by the brilliant blue sky outside the window behind my desk. I will miss looking outside at the beauty that surrounded me on this campus, but not what surrounded me every day inside this building. I took a slow sip from my stainless steel travel mug, inhaling the deep, sweet aroma of coffee and chicory.
“My decision to leave was difficult. I think our team has accomplished a great deal in the ten plus years I have been here. During my decade as Medical Director of the Lung Transplant program, I partnered with many of you to turn around a struggling program and increased the volume of transplants performed while achieving excellent outcomes.”
Teamwork sprinkled in with self-congratulations. Excellent. I rubbed my eyes that were dry and red from too little sleep and too much screen time. Okay, send it.
Not yet. I can’t. I want the words to be exactly right. Only one chance to get it the way I want it—to communicate my message to the people I worked with, both those who were in my corner and those who weren’t.
“By their very nature, decisions of this sort are multifaceted and are never about one single thing.”
No, this decision is about many things: frustration, burnout, disillusionment.
All passenger emotions—the unwelcome byproducts of leading one of the largest transplant programs in the country. For a bit longer than I should have. Longer than those close to me wanted me to.
I glanced at a picture of my family on the front step of our house, Jackie laughing at the camera, Ava in my lap, my arm tightly around Hannah.
Back to the screen. Focus, David.
“I am proud of what we accomplished together and hope from the deepest part of my heart that the important work that we do here will continue successfully.
Everyone needs a new challenge from time to time, and I am very excited to enter this new phase of my life and to the experiences that lie ahead for my family and me.”
Was I excited? Mostly I am excited to get the hell out of here. It has been my crowning professional achievement, true enough. But the price was too high, the physical and emotional debt too costly. It was time for the pilot to eject himself.
But if I’m honest, I have no idea what lies ahead for me.
I read it again from the top. It struck the right tone—not snarky, not apologetic, but gracious, forward-looking. An optimistic turn of the face to a new dawn and toward the warmth of the sun.
Okay, send it then.
Not yet.
“Thank you for your hard work over the years. Our efforts at providing excellence on behalf of the very sick people who count on us have always been paramount. Nothing should get in the way of this vital mission.”
Nothing should get in the way, but plenty did . Sometimes other people got in the way—sometimes I got in the way of myself, tripping over my own flaws.
Send.
The ground below came up fast to meet me, and my only thought right then was , Will the parachute open?
David Weill is the former Director of the Center for Advanced Lung Disease
and the Lung Transplant Program at Stanford. He is currently the Principal
of Weill Consulting Group, which focuses on improving the delivery of
transplant care.
Dr. Weill’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Salon,
Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, STAT, and the Washington Post. He also has
been interviewed on CNN and by the New York Times, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and the Wall Street Journal.
He lives with his wife and two daughters in New Orleans.
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