The two Indiana University medical students watched as cardiothoracic surgeon John Brown worked. It was a routine operation, but as it progressed, the students learned something about each other that was not routine: Dr. Brown had operated on both of them.

Mark Ayers, a third-year med student, had been under the knife three times in Brown's operating room, the first time when he was 9, the third time at 19. Those experiences helped solidify his decision to become a pediatric cardiologist.

 

Fourth-year student Jamie Hedman, an aspiring pediatrician, turned to Brown for help one year ago when a heart condition diagnosed at birth threatened to interfere with her medical studies.

 

For Brown, director of cardiothoracic surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine, working on students, colleagues or their family members is all part of the job. In his 28 years at IU, he's operated on the head of urology, the head of pediatrics, a former university president's wife and son, even the dean of the medical school.

 

"It's obviously an honor for me to be able to care for anybody in the medical family," Brown said. "When I get a faculty member who wants me to operate on them, I think of that as a real privilege."

 

But for Ayers and Hedman, the privilege is all theirs. Ayers met Brown at age 9, when he needed an artificial heart valve because of a serious cardiac infection. Five years later, Ayers outgrew that valve and returned for another operation during the Christmas break.

 

Now 24, Ayers still recalls how Brown and his family visited the kids in the hospital and also made sure young patients got a few holiday toys and visits from Pacers players.

 

"The stereotypical surgeon is someone who's not friendly and does not care about his patients, but Dr. Brown was the complete opposite of that," Ayers said.

 

Unlike Ayers, who developed his problems as a youngster, Hedman was born with a cardiac condition that required surgery before she was 2. After that surgery, she needed only routine follow-up care.

Last summer, though, something started to go awry. She was exhausted and had difficulty breathing. Her cardiologist recommended a heart valve replacement, and she found her way to Brown, who operated on her last fall.

 

"He's a wonderful, wonderful man; he's a surgeon by nature, so he's definitely a problem-solver," she said. "He was very upfront about what he could do and what he expected to happen and very realistic about the risks and benefits. I felt after I talked to him that this was the best way of giving me my life back."

 

Her health restored, Hedman returned to medical school. During a recent rotation in anesthesia at Riley Hospital for Children, she bumped into Brown and he invited her to watch him in Operating Room 8.

At first she was reluctant. Brown was doing the same procedure on a young girl that she had undergone as a toddler, and Hedman felt it was just a little too close to her own experience.

 

"Until that point, I didn't want to see myself like that," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I need to go and see what this is all about.' I made sure that I wasn't there for the opening of the case, because that's the part that I don't think I could handle."

 

When she finally slipped into the operating room, she found herself next to Ayers. He was standing away from the table, at the back of the room, watching the surgery on a video screen.

 

The two students, who hadn't met before, started chatting. Hedman told him that Brown had invited her because he had known her as a patient. Ayers told her that he, too, had been in that position.

 

"I thought, 'Wow, it's just amazing how many lives that Dr. Brown has touched,' " she said.