‘TICKER’ DOESN’T MISS A BEAT
Mimi Swartz found herself engaged in recurring conversations with an artist about the heart. That’s how her book “Ticker” came to be.
A San Antonio native, veteran reporter and author, Swartz left the city in the mid-1970s, just a few years after artist Dario Robleto was born there. Robleto is an internationally esteemed artist and infinitely curious polymath whose work often is built around themes and means of communication and the gristle of our existence. He’s fascinated by machines, but he’s also a true believer that the heart is more than just a pump.
Swartz was looking for an idea for her next book when she ended up meeting and talking to Robleto. Swartz, who has lived in Houston since 1976, knew famed heart surgeon Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier and his work at the Texas Heart Institute in the Texas Medical Center and says, “I considered him for a book, but I worried there wasn’t quite enough there for a book. Editors can be picky. Dr. Frazier was there at the beginning, but the story still starts before him.”
(Frazier, whose practices have been the subject of stories by the Houston Chronicle and ProPublica, has filed a lawsuit against the news organizations alleging defamation.)
Talking to Robleto, the discussion dovetailed into a dialogue about evolving technology and the race to be first. Afterward, she saw a narrative full of time and drama, and the drama that comes from dwindling time. Instead of a profile of a surgeon, she thought instead about the entirety of the quest to create an artificial heart, a process more than half a century old that hasn’t yet reached its conclusion.
So “Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart,” which will be released Tuesday, ended up a developing story about a lengthy subject that involved innovation, daring, perceived double-crosses, competition and conflict. Despite — maybe because of — Swartz’s exhaustive reporting, “Ticker” beats at an accelerated rate. Literally, it’s a story of life and death, but it is also far more intricate than such a binary summary. Writer Jane Mayer compared it to “The Right Stuff,” with which it shares some commonalities: the tension of daredevilry in the name of research and development, and multiple characters who are brilliant, eccentric and driven.
Five primary characters emerge in the story: Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley are the first, two bickering heart surgeons. As portrayed in “Ticker,” the former possesses a drive with blinders that puts fear into everyone in his orbit, the latter also brilliant and cunning yet more able to make people around him feel comfortable. Frazier worked with both and emerged from their feud a legend in his field, too. Further into the story, Swartz introduces us to Billy Cohn, the next-gen surgeon and magician (not a metaphor). And Daniel Timms, a seemingly unassuming engineer from Australia who gobsmacked all involved in the quest for an artificial heart with a development that dragged the focus into the new century.
Swartz tells all their stories with a novelist’s deft touch for character and dramatic tension. Her conversations with Robleto prompted her to dive deep into the history of artificial heart research while pulling up a chair for its most recent implementation. She’s seen plenty of calves with their hearts replaced, and heard the whooshing sound of the newest artificial heart models that replaces the heart’s “thum-thum.” The philosophical off-gassing that accompanies these developments is also addressed.
“It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it?” she asks. “We all take the heart for granted, until we get sick.
“If there’s anything I learned writing this book, it’s that many of us, if not most of us, when faced with the possibility of prolonging our lives, are going to go for it. You think you won’t. But I feel like when there’s a chance, people want to go for it.”
Swartz depicts several moments that counter the push for development with empathy. One is when DeBakey is near the end of his life and aware his heart is failing.
“He knew what he had, specifically,” Swartz says. “And he seemed ready to go.”
The surgeon’s wife, however, wasn’t ready for him to let go, and he underwent a procedure that kept him alive a little longer. He died in 2008.
The push-and-pull between DeBakey and Cooley steers the early narrative. They provide emotional notes closer to the book’s end, too, when younger players step onto the pitch in hopes of pushing the technology closer to viability. Swartz spends time elbow deep in the chest of the subject, though her story also extends outward to bring in characters such as Jim McIngvale, the beloved creator of a Houston furniture empire, whose connection to Frazier leads to a sizable donation for development of a new artificial heart created by Timms.
“Ticker” needs no further comparisons to “The Right Stuff.” But there are some similarities: Both space exploration and the development of an artificial heart are pursuits that do not yet have a final chapter. And both enjoyed periods of great renown, only to have the public begin to lose the fervor of its early interest.
Swartz tells one story about a Salvadoran man who skips town after having tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of hardware installed in his chest. Why did he miss his follow-up appointments? Because he felt fine. Those involved in the development can’t settle into the complacency that immerses the rest of us. Which means Swartz had to build an ending that I won’t describe here because it’s too fragile and beautiful to spoil.
“The minute I finished the book, I found myself wanting to rewrite the book,” Swartz says. But my editor said a nice thing to me, which is ‘The Emperor of All Maladies,’ the book about cancer, ended, and nobody cured cancer at the end of it. The innovations go on and on and on. Something will work reasonably well, or maybe it won’t. Then they refine it, and somebody will do something better.
“People do get better, but these developments take time.”
Swartz — who is an executive editor at Texas Monthly — has been working on a story about Houston after Hurricane Harvey. She sees commonalities between the heart and the flood.
“Everybody wants a fix now,” she says. “But it just takes longer. You think about it, in the grand scheme of things, 50 years is not very long. It seems long to us. But it’s not.”