Joe Bosco graduated second, ahead of 131 other students from Harvard’s Medical School. Any parent would “kvell” about that prodigious result. But not Joe’s dad! Upon hearing Joe’s status he responds, “Do you know what second place is son”? Those stinging words would compel Joe to realize his father’s expectation. Not an easy task for a son whose father is a Nobel Prize winner in the very field Joe is about to enter.
All That Really Matters by author Dr. David Weill is the tragic story of a young man driven to parallel his father’s brilliant legacy. After graduation, Dr. Joe Bosco matched at Stanford to start his residency as an intern in the cardiothoracic transplant “service.” An intern, Dr. Bosco begins his medical career checking lab results, signing surgical consent forms making an “organ donor run” delivering an iced heart or lung from a dead donor and patiently observing heart and lung transplants. For the young doctor it was exhilarating work “just like on TV.” But not quite what his father had in mind – a career in research that would change the world of science.
Dr. Joe Bosco quickly attains well-deserved recognition from the elite group of world-class colleagues as a respected cardiothoracic transplant surgeon. In addition he enjoys a high-roller life-style --- vacation beach houses, Porsche sports cars as well as genuine love from his girlfriend “the principled Kate” a research physician in infectious diseases. However, none of Joe’s stellar accomplishments merited his father’s standards.
Much against Kate’s pleas to join her at a Stanford branch clinic in Africa to treat a pandemic outbreak of malaria, Joe leaves Stanford altogether. He accepts an offer to head a “world class heart and lung transplant program” at Mercy Hospital incentivized by astronomical financial remuneration that might, at last, receive the recognition from his father. When it was not forthcoming and after Kate left for Africa, Joe turned to a lifestyle of excess abandoning hope of ever receiving his father’s approval. He camouflaged his disappointment with alcohol and recreational drugs wallowing in self-pity giving up on his father’s long awaited endorsement.
After a frequently recurring all-night “bender,” Dr. Bosco receives a text message of a lung, available for transplanting. He struggles into sobriety, arrives at the OR in a semi-sober state. Surrounded by a team ready to proceed with the lung implant, Dr. Bosco skillfully opens the woman’s chest as he has done hundreds of times, and then is jolted into shock by his colleagues’ incredulous revelation.
Author and former Director of the Center for Advanced Lung Disease and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical Center, David Weill breathes life into the complex relationship between father and son and universal values that really matter.