Let me put on my “Grandpa hat” for a moment.

Last week, my bride and I drove back to Indiana for a very special event, a “can’t miss” event. Grandson number one was graduating from medical school.

It is still hard to get my mind around the fact that this little child, the one with the bright smile that captured the heart of his grandmother in about 2 seconds, was becoming a doctor. But the calendar tells me he was no longer a child. He is a young man. After surviving four years of college and four years of medical school, he was heading to Chicago for a residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital where he will become part of the medical community we all depend upon.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning, we drove to the convention center in downtown Indianapolis and walked into a massive hall with about a thousand-plus other anxious and very proud relatives to witness the commencement ceremony. In the hallowed halls of academia, commencements seem to follow certain rules. One of them is the address. Before they confer degrees on the graduates, they are always subjected to a long and boring speech.

This graduation ceremony was different. The speaker was a smiling gentleman named Lawrence Einhorn, a distinguished physician and medical school professor. His address was neither long nor boring. It was magical and filled with hope for us all.

He began by explaining that he attended Indiana University Medical School expecting to graduate and move back home to Dayton, Ohio and go into a general medical practice with his father.

“However, due to an illness, he retired during the first year of my residency.  I then did an elective in hematology-oncology and was seduced by the science of the field, the courage of patients battling cancer, and the personal relationships oncologists had with their patients.”

He started treating young men affected with testicular cancer. At that time, he explained, when a doctor told a patient he had testicular cancer, it was akin to a death sentence, although it was a sentence with no chance of appeal. The statistics said more than 95 percent of these young men died. As he worked, he got frustrated.
“I got tired of watching my patients die,” he said.

After doing a lot of research, he added a form of platinum to the standard cocktail of chemotherapy drugs and his patients started to live. It was a major league breakthrough. In some cases, tumors dissolved within days. Then he attacked the toxic side effects of the treatment, shortened the chemo treatment from two years to three months and provided what Indiana University calls a research roadmap for generations of cancer specialists.

Dr. Jay Hess, the dean of the IU medical school, told the audience that Einhorn’s discoveries had saved 300,000 lives, and Hess knows what he is talking about. He told the audience that as a young man, he developed testicular cancer and his doctor called Einhorn for advice.That phone call led to a treatment that saved his life. Then he turned to the commencement speaker and thanked him.

For 30 years plus, Dr. Einhorn has been one of the superstars of the IU medical school faculty as patients from around the world have come to him for treatment, including world-famous bicycle racer Lance Armstrong.

Here is what Einhorn said about cancer research and his hopes for the future. “Over a century ago, Dr. Roentgen introduced the concept of diagnostic imaging with x-rays. Half a century later, the level of sophistication of imaging took a quantum leap forward with CT scans, MRIs, and PET scans, depicting internal structures with seemingly artistic perfection.

“Our current generation of new graduates will no longer be limited to what can be visualized with the naked eye, thanks to byproducts from the Human Genome Project. The current era of molecular medicine and precision genomics allows us to discern germline mutations to predict future problems, both for patients as well as their family members, discover oncogenes associated with cancer that can be therapeutically exploited, and solve problems that defied resolution a mere decade ago.”

Then he reminded the grads, and us all, that health care is more than pharmaceutical formularies, complex legislation, computers and the bottom line.
“We are healers, and what makes a great doctor is compassion as well as passion. A great doctor cares about his or her patients, (he is) not merely caring for them.”

Then the 300-plus grads paraded over the stage and sought out their friends and relatives. I know one grandmother who couldn’t wait to wrap her arms around the neck of a newly minted doctor.

Grandpa was pretty darned proud, too.