In 1956, Dr. Nelson did the first open-heart surgery
in the state of Utah.
At that time, the main challenge was actually open-heart.
There had been closed-heart surgery done,
but the problem is, as soon as you open up the heart,
there's a lot of blood in it.
And what are you supposed to do with that blood?
And that blood is meant to go through your lungs
to get oxygen and then go to the rest of your body,
to your brain, to deliver oxygen.
And so we had to figure out a way--how do you support
the patient's circulation while not having the heart do any
of the work?
And so that was the development of what we call today
the heart-lung machine.
Dr. Nelson, in his time when he was up in Minnesota,
worked with John Kirklin and Walt Lillehei.
And these people were at the forefront of the technology.
When he came into medical school,
he would have been told that the heart is
an organ that you don't touch.
But I think he just recognized that there's problems here.
"This is what we need.
I'm going to do what I need to do to help
move the field forward."
He laid it upon himself as a challenge in the attempt
to try to help others that had sufferable disease that
could not otherwise be fixed.
It turns out that when he came back to Utah in the '50s
and did this operation in 1956, Utah was just really
the third state in the country to do open-heart surgery.
It had such a huge impact.
Somebody could get a heart valve replaced rather than die.
Or a child that would otherwise die,
because they couldn't get blood flow through the lungs,
was able to get an operation that allowed them to live.
These are pretty profound things that happened.
He was a part of that history of what we all today
just take for absolute granted.
I did a heart surgery this morning,
and I didn't even think twice about the fact
that I was putting someone on the heart-lung machine.
And it was because of him.
Being a part of that original team
has to be considered a key accomplishment.
But from then on, there were multiple accomplishments.
He's a master surgeon, and his results were phenomenal.
He had this particular way of putting
a tube into the pulmonary vein.
And he told me that would always work.
"Stick with it."
Well, as I got more proficient at whatever I was doing,
one day I was operating with him, and I put that stitch in.
And I thought, "I can improve that a little
by just sort of incorporating more tissue
and making a circular stitch."
And he just stopped me, and he said,
"Do it the way I told you, and you'll never get into trouble."
And he's right.
I've done that particular maneuver the same way
that he taught me for the next, what, over 40 years now.
And it's always worked.
The thing that Dr. Nelson is most noted
for within the academic environment
is the fact that he was the program
director of the training program for future heart surgeons.
He was a born teacher.
He loved to teach.
And he just had a unique skill at it.
I've heard many people say that it was a different feeling
in his operating room.
He never was degrading but wanted everyone
to know that they added an important part.
For a young resident, it was a very tense time,
coming into the operating room and knowing how high the stakes
were if you made a mistake.
But Dr. Nelson had a way of just calming you down.
And even if you made a mistake, he would very carefully
explain how you did that wrong and maybe a better way
would be to do it this way the next time.
And it just sort of encouraged you
to do it better than you had done before.
He held multiple national positions.
And he was right there in that group that were doing,
every day, something that was moving the needle that we
cannot even come close to moving right now.
I'm very grateful for the privilege
it's been to be one who could make
a contribution in medicine.
True, he was a great scientist, a phenomenal clinician,
but he always carried with him that aura
of being a man who really had faith.
I think he projected that to his patients.
It gave them confidence to put their lives in his hands.
For us as physicians and surgeons, the Dr. Nelson piece,
we actually don't separate from the President Nelson piece,
because we think that the two are pretty close together.
You know, we look to him and the way
that he's conducted his life, the way that he
was a physician and a surgeon.
We strive to be like that.
Well, Dr. Nelson, I certainly wish you
a very happy 95th birthday.
You've done so many great things in your life
and have been so important to so many people,
me being one of them.
It's been an honor to be able to have learned from you
in every aspect of life.
And I just can't thank you enough for what you
have meant to me and my career.