Editor’s note: Following the publication of this piece, the writer disclosed that he used AI tools in his writing and editing process. Such use goes against The Globe's policy prohibiting generative AI tools for writing and editing.
Dr. Subodh Verma is Canadian cardiac surgeon.Supplied
Subodh Verma is cardiac surgeon, University of Toronto professor and Canada Research Chair in cardiovascular surgery.
A little after 2 a.m., in the middle of a Northern Ontario snowstorm, my pager went off.
A man had arrived at a remote hospital with a catastrophic injury. He had intentionally shot a large crossbow directly into his chest in an act of suicide. Through the heart. And, against every expectation, his heart was still beating.
He was hundreds of kilometres away from where I slept, in Toronto. The weather was against him. Both time and biology was not on his side. And yet, before I ever entered an operating room, a chain of people had already begun to save his life.
A paramedic moved quickly through the snow. Pilots flew the man south when most of the country was asleep. An emergency physician stayed calm. Nurses, anesthesiologists, perfusionists and technicians prepared for a case.
When I arrived in the operating room, a few hours later, many hands did what they had trained their whole lives to do.
Years later, that man is alive. He has rebuilt his life. He has had more years with the people who love him.
I am often called the surgeon who miraculously saved him. That is not true. I was one person in a long human chain. What saved him was not one pair of hands. It was a system. It was skill. More than anything, it was about trust – people who had never met him, depending on one another and doing everything they could to keep him alive. A team that refused to let another stranger disappear.
I am a cardiac surgeon. Over more than two decades, I have operated on more than 6,000 human hearts. I have also spent much of my career as a scientist as well, working in diabetes, obesity, heart failure and cardiovascular disease.
And after all those operations, all those trials, all those days and nights standing over an open chest repairing hearts, the deepest lesson I have learned runs against the story our culture keeps telling itself.
Professor Emil Sebastian Bücherl (right) in December, 1968, at the Neukölln Municipal Hospital during open-heart surgery.picture alliance/Getty Images
We keep crediting lone geniuses.
The heart has taught me otherwise.
The breakthroughs that matter most are rarely the work of a single brilliant person in a single brilliant moment. They are acts of interdependence.
That is true in surgery. No one saves a life alone. Not the surgeon. Not the nurse. Not the anesthesiologist. Not the paramedic. Not the person who starts CPR before help arrives. Modern medicine works only because people who may never stand on a big stage still choose, every day, to do their part with excellence.
It is also true in science.
Consider the medicines Canadians now know by names such as Ozempic, Mounjaro, Jardiance and Forxiga. Many began as treatments for diabetes. But through decades of work across laboratories, clinics, countries and disciplines, they taught us something larger. Some changed how we treat obesity. Some changed how we treat heart failure. Some changed how we protect the kidney and the heart. Together, they reshaped our understanding of chronic disease.
That did not happen because one person had a lightning-bolt insight. It happened because teams were humble enough to follow signals they did not expect. The question began in one place and the answer opened somewhere else.
Dr. Michael DeBakey operates on a patient at the Texas Medical Center, in 1987. Debakey’s inventions and techniques have revolutionized and standardized the art of cardiovascular surgery.Bettmann/Getty Images
I have been fortunate to help lead some of that work. What struck me most was how progress actually happened – gradually, often unexpectedly, and through many people bringing different ideas and expertise to the same problem. No one person could have done it alone.
There is a third kind of breakthrough I have come to respect as much as any operation or discovery. It happens quietly, often behind closed doors.
A medical student who sits across from me and says, almost in a whisper, “I think I am done.”
A young surgeon who has lost confidence and cannot imagine continuing.
A resident doctor in training who is exhausted, embarrassed and belittled, and believes she does not belong.
These are not ordinary professional setbacks. These are moments at the edge. Moments when mentorship is no longer about teaching a technique. It is simply about presence.
In those moments, there is no textbook. No protocol. No perfect phrase. There is only the decision to stay with them. To sit beside someone long enough that they do not have to face the darkness alone. To hold belief for them until their own returns.
Some of the people who once sat across from me convinced they were finished are now surgeons and physicians caring for Canadians today. Some are leading programs. Not because I saved them. Because someone stayed long enough for them to see themselves again.
No machine will ever do that.
Artificial intelligence will transform medicine. It will help us diagnose earlier, analyze faster and perhaps discover therapies we cannot yet imagine. But no algorithm can look into the face of a human being who has lost faith in themselves and lend them belief until their own comes back.
That is not a technical act. It is a moral one.
Respectfully, this is why the talk about innovation feels incomplete. We spend a lot of time talking about disruption, technology, productivity and artificial intelligence, and we tend to focus on the people at the very front of the story. What gets less attention are all the people behind them whose work, trust and persistence made the progress possible in the first place.
For example, we do not speak enough about the nurse who notices the subtle change. The trainee who asks the uncomfortable question. The scientist whose “failed” experiment points the field in a new direction. The mentor or teacher who keeps a young person from walking away.
If Canada wants breakthroughs, it must fund and protect the conditions that actually produce them: long-horizon science, cross-disciplinary collaboration, strong public systems, humane training environments and care teams whose work is essential precisely because it is not glamorous.
And it must extend that interdependence beyond our own borders. Children still die of rheumatic heart disease in parts of the world because they cannot access prevention and treatment that should be ordinary. Their hearts are not less worthy because they were born elsewhere.
For me, the human heart has been a radical teacher of equity.
After you open the chest, the labels fall away. The heart of the banker is the heart of the refugee. The heart of the executive is the heart of the person sleeping in a shelter. The heart does not recognize race, religion, language, income or passport. It is the same colour, has the same fragility, the same astonishing will to keep beating.
Dr. Subodh Verma.Supplied
Every heart can break. Every heart can fail. But, every heart can heal.
Regrettably, not every heart has equal access to the care that allows it to heal.
I said a version of these ideas recently from a TEDx stage, expecting very little. On social media, clips from that talk were viewed by more than 40 million people within weeks. I do not think that happened because the message was new. I think it happened because people are tired of a culture that tells them they must stand alone.
There is a word for this in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa: ubuntu. It means that “I am because we are.”
We are human only through the humanity of others.
After 6,000 heart operations, I believe that is more than a beautiful phrase. It is a biological, scientific and civic truth.
The heart beats about 100,000 times a day, more than three billion times in a lifetime. It asks for no applause. It makes no speech. It simply gives itself, again and again, to the work of sustaining life.
And with every beat, in every chest, it reminds us of something we seem determined to forget.
The deepest truth of a human life is not independence. It is interdependence.
That may be the breakthrough Canada needs most.