Stephen Westaby, a British surgeon in the cardiovascular area, will have operated on more than 12,000 heart patients and saved about 97% thanks to brain injury.
The “street kid” from Scunthorpe – as he calls himself – says he wanted to be a surgeon when at the age of 7 he saw a program on the BBC where a heart hole operationsomething that fascinated him. Also the death of his grandfather, at the age of 63, victim of a heart attack, and later of his grandmother with thyroid cancer, were motivations for him to fight for this dream.
Westaby has always considered himself a shy child, who was “afraid of his own shadow”, characteristics that are not compatible with the profession.
Surgeons need to have the right temperament. They must be able to explain the death to the relatives of the people. From being able to fill in for the chief surgeon when he is tired, to taking responsibility for the postoperative care of young babies who are struggling or even dealing with trauma in the operating room.”
In an interview granted to the British newspaper DailyMail in 2019, the doctor assures that during his university years he played rugby and that in 1968 he had an accident that could have ended his career, but had the totally opposite effect. Westaby suffered head trauma that “affected the part of my brain responsible for critical thinking and risk avoidance” and that on a personality level, this incident resulted in his “lack of inhibition, irritability, and occasional aggression.”
The consequences of the accident were assessed by a psychologist who told the doctor, then 18 years old, that he scored high on the ‘psychopathic personality inventory’ but that there was no reason to be alarmed because “Most of the big winners are psychopaths”.
The changes weren’t expected to be permanent, but on a personality level, this incident resulted in his “lack of inhibition, irritability, and occasional aggression,” the traits he needed to excel in the medical world.
The 73-year-old doctor is Recognized internationally for helping develop the use of heart pumps to replace the human heart, pioneering artificial hearts, and technology that helps pump blood throughout the body.
Source: Observadora
