Latest / Voices of Otolaryngology / Sixteen Cases, One Truth: Writing Breathless

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Sixteen Cases, One Truth: Writing Breathless · Voices of Otolaryngology

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Welcome to the Voices of Otolaryngology podcast series, where we spotlight
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diverse perspectives and insights within the field of otolaryngology.
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I'm your host, Rahul Shah.
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Let's jump into it.
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Welcome to Voices of Otolaryngology.
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I am super excited.
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Today I've made a new friend, Doctor Tali Lando.
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Did I pronounce that right? Perfect.
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All right, well, tell us about yourself.
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Maybe, like, can we do everything in 70 seconds?
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Med school, residency, fellowship where you are now?
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Try to do that all Doctor Lando.
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Okay, so I did my ENT residency at NYP, which was Cornell and Columbia
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in the city.
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And then I did my
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pediatric airway fellowship at CHOP in Philly.
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I actually took my first job out of fellowship at Westchester
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Medical Center, where I have stayed for 15 years.
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And I have a really busy clinical practice.
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We've always had
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a residency teaching component, but now we have our own residency,
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so kind of shifted from semi academic to more academic.
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And I have three kids, I live in Westchester, two dogs, a husband as well.
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And that's me in a nutshell.
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Amazing, amazing.
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Your nutshell would be quite large because we could talk hours
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about you as a person.
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And I'll tell everybody how I know that just in a joking sense.
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You know, the world is bigger than New York and Pennsylvania, right?
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I mean, it seems like that's been the epicenter for, you.
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Know, actually,
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yes. And embarrassingly, I
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also went to undergrad at Columbia, so I really never left.
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Yeah, my my family is very New York centric.
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I will say. No problem. It's a compliment.
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It's a good thing.
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Tell us about your practice a little bit.
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You said you're in an academic setting.
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Give us kind of
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like what a what a week looks like for you or what kind of patients you see.
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And then I want to get into something entirely different.
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So be ready.
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We're just going to pivot from there. Okay.
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So typically I have three clinic days and two full O.R.
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days.
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I do see a lot of bread and butter just because of my patient in population
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probably 80/20, sometimes 70/30, where 80%
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is really tubes, tonsils, (inaudible), nasal congestion.
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But then I have this really diverse 20% because we are a major medical center
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with a huge catchment area, so very complex zebras,
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which can be, you know, mainly NIC-U, PIC-U transfers.
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We don't have a huge airway reconstruction program, although we do
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see kind of everything but and, and it is like a level
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one trauma center that I'm based in with a freestanding children's hospital.
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Awesome.
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Now let's completely pivot.
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I was blessed to interview you for fellowship, we’re both pediatric
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otolaryngologists, and I think we didn't end up together
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because we're not New York in Washington, D.C., but I was blown away
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to know you're an author and you're not a first time author.
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You're a second time author.
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We got connected through some mutual friends,
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and I read your book, “Breathless.” It was amazing.
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I couldn't put it down.
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I've told everybody I know about it.
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What is “Breathless”? What is the book?
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And then I want to get into your mind. What?
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Why did you write, etc., etc.
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but anyways, what is “Breathless?” So “Breathless” is a 16 case
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medical memoir if you want to kind of, you know, reduce it to that.
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But basically each case I structured like the O.R.,
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because I wanted to be able to choose cases that have a really huge arc,
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something that was very unique about the journey of this patient
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and that had a lot of takeaway messages that could be applicable
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to people in training and also people already out in the field.
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And then I, in each case, get very deep
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into the aftermath of how these patients affect us.
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And obviously I use them as examples because they could apply
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you learn all this spillover element could be in any patient situation
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and talk about what happens after you leave the O.R.
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and after you leave your clinic.
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And how does this reverberate into your personal life?
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And I'm brutally honest. So I think that
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that maybe is what makes me a bit unique is that I'm not ashamed.
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And I never regret sharing those personal experiences,
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even if it's revealing and and along with a lot of mistakes.
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And so this kind of compendium of my 15 year career, with all the wisdom
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I've gained from others and from myself and from failures and triumphs,
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I wanted to encapsulate into this one book.
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And it's obviously mostly pediatric airway.
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But because I cover adults as well, it has other cases that are not just peds.
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Yeah, well, very, very well summarized.
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The book is amazing.
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I didn't know there were 16 stories.
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They each felt so awesome.
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And I give it my seal of approval.
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I am a colleague of yours.
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The stories are legit.
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The pathology is legit.
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You know, I was reading through them like, oh, where's an exit procedure?
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Oh, she talks about it.
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I don't want to keep spoiling everything.
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I have now started recommending it to med students because I love how deep you go.
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And you say, you know,
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if you're putting a child to sleep for certain case,
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this is how you want to keep them spontaneously breathing.
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The book is amazing and we will find ways to put you in
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front of our residents/fellows, but also mid-career, which gets me to you.
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You are so busy.
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Where in the world did you find time to write?
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Why do you write?
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I could think of 30 things you could be doing,
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including picking the kids up from basketball.
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It's in the book, so I can admit that.
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But where do you find the time and why?
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So, you know, one thing that I thought a lot about is like,
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what can you contribute to the world as an individual?
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All of us are super dedicated clinicians.
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We're smart, we're self-selected.
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But I think that not all of us are great in a leadership
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capacity, in the sense of leadership on committees and in conferences.
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Some people, that is a very good trait of theirs.
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They have a lot of executive function skills, or
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they're really academic in terms of like research production.
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And I did not feel that that was where like my value
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to the world lay aside from my patient population.
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But I've always been a writer, and I really do see the world in stories.
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I mean, people make fun of me, all my friends and my family.
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Why can't I just come home and just say something happen?
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Why does it have to be this huge life lesson and narrative?
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But I, I really think that there's
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a great value in that, in terms of teaching and relating
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and also for your self, just combating the things that bring you down in life.
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And so that's really it was it
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fueled my fire rather than taking away from my time.
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And as we all know, when something is a passion of yours,
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you create space for it as opposed to it being something
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you you're oh my gosh, I finished my day and now I have to do this assignment.
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So I did it.
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Late nights and all the cracks I dictated on my hour long commutes.
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I would write in the bathroom.
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I mean, I just did it when
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during turnover, when I was frustrated that a patient wasn't waking up.
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I just did it everywhere.
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Thank you for that.
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That's the But this wasn't your first book.
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That's true.
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So my first book was, I think, of as the book
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I was forced to write instead of the book that I really wanted to write.
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So, you know, I always wanted to write a book.
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This was a lifelong dream since I was seven, and I needed the substance for it.
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But I wasn't a fiction writer, so I needed the life experience to also
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feel like not just I'm writing for myself, but something that has a greater value.
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And when I had my third child had just come out of the NIC-U,
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I was diagnosed or I actually found myself very advanced breast cancer.
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It ended up being Stage 3C, so that's not where you want to be,
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especially as a head and neck surgeon in any cancer, even breast cancer,
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and therefore I ended up just due to circumstance and really feeling that
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I couldn't push all the way through chemo being fully like employed.
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That was the one time in my entire life where I did not continue my career,
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despite everything else going on in my life, and therefore I had some time.
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It wasn't a pleasant time and I didn't feel very good,
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but I had some actual like designated writing time whenever I was not too
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sick, and I had this life experience that was unfolding in front of me,
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like really becoming the patient when you were the doctor.
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All that entails, all the coming back to life afterwards and redefining yourself.
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And, you know, just this, this huge personal arc.
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And I decided that I wanted to create “The
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Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce of Breast Cancer” is what I kept calling it.
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But from the surgeon turned patient turned surgeon again perspective.
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And that was my first book: “Hell and Back.” How long did that take to write?
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What was the gap between that and “Breathless”?
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So it was very, very different because that book, the six months
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that I was going through chemo, I wrote half of the book,
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and then I had to get back to work in the middle of radiation.
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And if anyone's gone through it.
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You're crazy exhausted.
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So I lost all my bandwidth.
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I mean, just to function during the day,
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recovering from chemo and going through radiation and like,
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having three little toddlers and a baby or two toddlers and a baby.
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So it's sat in my computer for another half a year.
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But that was really just situational.
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And then I said, you know, this is one of my dreams,
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and I do believe it has value for patients and for other doctors going through
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any type of health crisis.
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And so I picked it up again.
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But there was that delay.
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So the whole process then took about two years.
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And, you know, the editing process
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that comes after writing a book, if you are really, really want
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perfection, that takes another really whole six months to a year.
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Because at the end of all my storytelling, I decided if I'm putting
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something out into the world, it has to be comprehensive.
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So I have to include, you know, all the like, reconstruction and
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many steps so that a person could just pick it up and it's going to cover
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almost everything - with regard to, let's say, breast cancer -
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even though I'm not an oncologist or a breast surgeon,
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if I'm going to be a doctor
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writing a book about a medical problem, it has to really
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have an entire collection of experiences except for, thank God,
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distant metastasis, which I did not cover because I did not experience.
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But it was late two and a half years.
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I felt that in the book “Breathless”
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authenticity is a trite, overused word.
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But you literally felt like I was right by you in the O.R.
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turning the head, masking the patient, reaching for the graspers,
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the thought process through the cases.
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So then what was the gap between “Hell and Back” and “Breathless”?
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How much time did you take between those books?
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So, first of all,
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I don't want to be morbid, but I thought it would be very depressing
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to start a medical memoir and then not live for it to come out.
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So I kind of, in my mind thought, you know, ten years from the time of
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diagnosis is a pretty good accomplishment when you have advanced disease.
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So it was only after I had that under my belt,
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and I didn't feel like I was going to become like a lifetime drama story
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that I felt like, okay, I can write about my career now.
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So that's why.
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And also, I needed a career to talk about, right?
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Because “Hell and Back” was the beginning of my career.
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So ten years later, I felt that I'm in the position to have
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amassed all these pearls of wisdom and all that I gained from
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so many different mentors and and all these clinical experiences
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that I had, like what it took to write “Breathless” .
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So that's where the gap came from.
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and then the two other blocks
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that I had that I had to overcome before starting “Breathless”.
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We could talk about more in detail if you want.
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Is what do I do about the HIPAA compliance problem, which I just butted up against.
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So I actually did think about that for a year and worked that out
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both in my own head and while talking to many colleagues
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in order to really say, hey, I can do this in a way
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that is going to protect me, the patients not have my institution
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attack me, etc..
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You said there were two blocks.
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One was HIPAA and.
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Someone to believe in me
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was the other one because this was first of all,
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it was all my personal expense and I just it was a giant expense.
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So I had to believe that, like I said, I obviously my own ego
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is very involved in this, but it also had to have a purpose in the world
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that was worth putting in all my own money that everyone tells you
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you'll never see back, because that's just the way of the world for books.
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You know, books in and of themselves, not necessarily what they lead you to.
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And, and somebody became that person, this, this woman that I met who
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online, who
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first said she would not have any bandwidth to work with me.
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And then six months after reading my very, very rough draft for “Breathless”,
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she called me back and I got this one email saying,
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“Oh my God, I just read your first book.
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It was sitting on my computer.
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All this time.” I had sent her a PDF, and now that I read it on
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my vacation, just impulsively, this this book
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editor publisher, I want to work with you on the next thing.
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And once someone believed in me, I figured out the HIPAA thing
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I always had the the substance, you know, around in my head.
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That's when I really said, I'm going to start putting this pen to paper,
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which is obviously computer in reality.
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So if I can do my math right, if I can add a decade onto two toddlers, a
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baby, a husband and two dogs, you started writing kind of in their pre-teen years.
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So you started when life was very complicated.
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How long did it take you to write “Breathless” ?
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How did you do it in a full clinical load?
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Full family load?
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So it's really funny.
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I know exactly when I started it because once a year my family goes away
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for Passover and we go to a destination, my extended family.
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But then I'm left alone in the hotel room for a couple days
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while my kids are out with their cousins, and there's no guilt
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because they're just like in a wonderful, beautiful place.
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And I sat there in my hotel room and I said, I'm going to start.
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And there were five cases that I mean, those were the ones,
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the ones you just carried in your soul.
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So that beginning, it just spilled out.
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I mean, I had to perfected and refine it and all that stuff, but
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just putting it down, I knew exactly who those five patients were,
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and some of them were obviously like the ones that tortured me for years
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because something did go wrong and it had not ended in just one little.
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Okay, here was my problem.
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There was an airway foreign body, I removed it,
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I say this kid's life and I moved on.
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And so that's where I started.
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My other little secret, my other dirty little secret is that I don't ski.
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I'm very embarrassed about that.
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But I didn't want my kids to be that way.
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So. Ski trips. I am also left alone
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in the ski lodge where I provide emotional support and money.
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But I don't have to physically be out there and you've got all this time
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you can get a margarita or a Bloody Mary if you want early in the morning.
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No judgment.
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And I brought my computer and I had this time, this just amazing time.
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And those are my two giant chunks in that first year where I really did
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a bulk of the work, and the rest was all little bits and pieces.
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Well, fill in the rest.
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How long?
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It's always great
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chatting with the native New Yorker because I can't get a word in edgewise.
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Tell me, how long did it take?
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So you started writing?
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How long?
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How long till you got something to an editor?
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And then we're going to talk about your forward. But.
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But how long till you got a draft?
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So it took a year and a half, I would say,
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until I hit the point where I let somebody read my rough draft.
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And I've talked about this a bunch of times,
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because I find it to be an amazing how people's inputs,
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big and small, can really mold what you produce in this world.
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And so I did not have that section about the personal part.
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It was built into the story, but not as a designated per case section.
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So I had two people read it initially, not the publisher.
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I had a neighbor of mine who's also a good friend,
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and I had my teenage 13 year
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old daughter, or 12.5, and both of them independently, came back to me and said,
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I want to know what happened after that story ends.
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And I said, what do you mean, exactly?
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Like nothing crazy happened.
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And they're like, I want to know what happened
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when you got home, when you got into your garage.
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And that is how I started writing the at home section for each chapter.
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So that actually I went back to every experience and then finished it off.
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And obviously, remember, there's a lot of literary license,
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so those experiences might not have perfectly matched the amalgam
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of cases that I was talking about, but it was all of those experiences were real.
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And that took another that was hard, you know, because.
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Hold on, hold on.
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There's like, no way I'm going to be able to drive this here.
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So I'm going to keep cutting you off. All right.
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So it took you one and a half years to get a draft.
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And then from the draft till you actually saw it to buy, how long did it take?
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Including editing time, which is such a big component.
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Afterwards it was probably 2 to 2 and a half years.
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So from that first Passover when you were sequestered in a hotel
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till I could buy it, maybe four years?
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No, no, no, no, like total sorry.
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Because it was like a year, year, year
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and a half to write and then that six months to,
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you know, write that extra section and start the editing process.
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I kind of did it simultaneously.
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You know, I might finish one section and.
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Then how much time from the first - Two and a half years total.
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And that's not bad. Not bad.
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What are
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benchmarks do you know or is every author different?
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I guess it depends on whether I mean, the old years
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of, you know, having certain number of pages that somebody reads.
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I think that that's gone to a certain degree.
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So that is I think that's how authors used to work.
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I, I really was like, I need it.
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And I didn't give it to my editor to read and edit
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in a professional way until I felt “done-done.”
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And I had read it myself twice,
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and I ChatGPT edited it myself once.
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So I because you're paying I mean, again, I was it's all my own dime
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and you're paying them for their time.
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So I really wanted it to be like as perfect
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so that what they gave to me was like super valuable.
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Not just like typos and grammatical errors.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
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You have a very special forward.
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Can you please acknowledge that and talk a little bit about that?
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So Mike Rutter I mean he it's funny
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you asked me like, oh did you do your residency in Cincinnati?
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I mean, sorry, fellowship, because it, it sounds like he mentored me
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and he was one of those I adopted myself as a mentee and it started really small.
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I just this is another kind of amazing story where I had a patient problem
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I called Luv Javia at (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia),
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who was my senior fellow who was then an attending at Chop.
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And about this particular problem, he's like, you know,
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Mike Rutter is the only one that's done X.
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And that's how I first met him, was just a phone call about a patient
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reaching out to somebody I literally didn't know and only heard of.
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But he became a person that was willing to read
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my chapters one by one as a favor and give me some input.
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So he was in the background.
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Aside from all the other people that I mentioned, he was a huge factor
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and moving forward, supporting me, saying “Yes.” He's very pithy.
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So it would be like, “nicely done.” I mean, it wasn't, it was it was just
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a little bit of encouragement knowing that I was on the right track of a value.
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And so at the end, I obviously asked him to write the foreword.
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But the foreword is a true story that I think does embody my tenacity,
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which is, I think, why he was willing to go to the mat for me.
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And obviously I super appreciate it.
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And then also very deliberately road his coattails
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because he has validity and I really don't on the national forum.
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And, you know, you got to use what you have.
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I know you have young children, so I'm going to
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give you a challenge and I'm going to ask if you've listened to my podcast.
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You know, I asked this question.
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And if you haven't, well, you can listen to more of them.
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So our daughter taught us “High/Low/Buffalo”.
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If you've listened, you know what I mean by that.
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So what is the high?
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What is the low and what is the buffalo?
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The buffalo's the zebra,
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the unusual thing that happened and the right way to answer it.
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When your children ask you on vacation “Dad, what's the High/Low/Buffalo?
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Well, the high was spending time with you children.
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The low was.
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Geez, kids, I wish I could have spent more time with you.
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And the buffalo was like, it's too bad I have to work.
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Otherwise I could spend more time with you, right?”
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The right answer is all about them.
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Walk me through and we'll go one by one.
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Give me the high of this experience, the low
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and then the most bizarro thing during this process.
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The high is 100%.
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Whenever anyone from the category of people
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I wanted to reach says this resonated with me.
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So I got a message.
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This is seriously one of my highs.
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I got two messages on WhatsApp very recently from pediatric otolaryngologists
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in one of these worldwide group chats
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saying - one person said,
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I have never listened to something that so embodied my personal experience.
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And thank you for writing this because it felt like you were talking about myself.
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So just giving people like us very dedicated, a feeling
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like we are suddenly heard and understood and someone's articulated it.
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That's a super high.
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And the other high is just on the flip end of that would is this one
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I'm waiting for.
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It really hasn't happened
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is what you just said the medical student or the pre-med student?
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Because that was my other target who says, I read this,
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and now I want to dedicate my life to something that has this level
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of like sacrifice, ups, good, bad, ugly, all of that.
23:29
And if I can like, reach those two sides and it and it's something
23:33
that they are happy to have read that's like that's my highest high.
23:38
Yeah.
23:39
I sent I was reading the book on a plane to the CEORL meeting,
23:45
and sitting next to me was a pediatric otolaryngologist from Dublin.
23:49
So I just sent her the book.
23:51
So we'll see if it resonates across the ocean.
23:55
I mentor a lot of medical students and they've read it, Tali.
23:59
They love it.
23:59
And I told him to go back and read it before they start their internship,
24:03
because there's a lot of science pearls in there.
24:05
So that's the high.
24:07
What's the low of the whole and focus on “Breathless” .
24:10
What's the low I don't want to be negative about it,
24:15
but it's the financial output because I really
24:19
went all the way in terms of wanting it to be a very professional product,
24:23
but there's not money in it.
24:25
And therefore I reached this point where I realized just for my
24:29
personal finances, because my husband was always encouraging me.
24:33
Yeah, do that, you know, get a PR person, have it
24:37
edited, put it out there, do follow every road.
24:40
And by the end of the year, I was in a hole.
24:44
Like a hole where I had to, you know, like take from my line of credit hole.
24:48
And then just this scary feeling that I just did something really selfish
24:53
that maybe I shouldn't have done vis a vis my family.
24:58
Thank you for that.
25:00
But it's much more than that.
25:02
It's more than writing a book.
25:04
I mean, it's a passion, it's a hobby.
25:06
And we all spend our resources and money
25:09
not just in the bank, but on things that give us life.
25:13
All right, Buffalo, give me a buffalo.
25:15
What's the most bizarre thing I'm going to consider, doctor Rutter?
25:18
I didn't call him a buffalo.
25:19
And I'm sure he's going to listen to this. He's an icon.
25:21
We'll call him a GOAT.
25:22
How about we call Mike Rutter a GOAT?
25:24
Okay?
25:24
He's one of the greatest of all time pediatric airway
25:27
surgeons, mentors and friends.
25:29
But what's a buffalo for you? During this whole process?
25:33
Can it
25:34
be that a homeless person stole it from the lobby/waiting room of my office
25:40
last week, and he's either using it as toilet paper
25:44
or a heating element to keep the fire going at night.
25:49
And I'm wondering why.
25:51
You know, it's just very funny.
25:52
It goes like in my one of my offices with like a
25:56
more challenging population, not the pediatric ones.
25:59
People keep stealing it.
26:02
What have patients said about the book?
26:04
Any of those 16 patients that you feature?
26:08
Obviously their parents or maybe them?
26:10
Or other patients, what is the reaction been?
26:15
And it's going to be mixed.
26:16
So I'd say, oh gosh, are you going to write about me?
26:20
So every single chapter is not a true
26:25
story in the sense of it's an amalgam, it's a true amalgam.
26:30
And all the details are changed except one.
26:35
That one I reached.
26:37
I'm very close with the mother.
26:39
I reached out in advance.
26:41
I told her the entire story.
26:43
I told her I wanted to write a book.
26:45
This was at the way outset because she was my first patient I wanted to talk about.
26:48
I gave her the entire chapter.
26:51
I obviously did change the names and some details, regardless
26:55
of what she was going to say.
26:56
And I and I got her direct feedback.
27:00
So she's the only mom who is like, this is my child.
27:03
And she wrote back to me, maybe within an hour, not even longer than that.
27:09
I don't want you to change anything.
27:12
You perfectly captured our experience.
27:15
You are free to use her actual name.
27:17
I did not do that and I think that was a good idea.
27:19
Plus, she's a child and she might change her mind later on.
27:22
And that you know, so I know directly from at least the mom who went through that.
27:29
And this was like the one that didn't turn out well.
27:31
Right?
27:31
So this is not the triumph that it
27:36
she felt like this elevated her and her husband and her child
27:41
and obviously was very carefully chosen to be that,
27:45
you know, one where I was being honest and I am still scared
27:49
because you are still we all know the climate we're in.
27:52
I mean, you are open to scrutiny or open to lawsuits, no matter.
27:58
Just the world isn't fair.
27:59
And New York is very litigious.
28:01
No matter what you think you do to protect yourself,
28:03
it doesn't stop someone from bringing litigation against you,
28:06
whether it's valid or not, or just social media blasting you.
28:11
And you're, you know,
28:12
I'm out there and I'm very susceptible if somebody was unhappy with me.
28:17
So but, you know, with my patients, families
28:20
that have read it, they're very, very positive and effusive.
28:24
And I think I'm not afraid for patients to know me on a personal level,
28:28
but that's just my choice that I've always made.
28:31
So I think some people really want to keep that separation.
28:34
And I do, you know, in the O.R., I don't say call me Tali to my parents
28:38
because I think they need that comfort of like, you are my child's
28:42
surgeon, So how do your current patients react?
28:46
So they're not sitting with a one time author?
28:49
They're sitting with a two time author,
28:51
which means the probability of being a three time author is big.
28:54
Are you going to take my stories? What do they ask you?
28:57
My biggest fan
29:00
is one particular patient's dad.
29:03
He's so funny.
29:05
So his kid would have been a chapter 100%.
29:09
Except I had just submitted the book for upload,
29:12
and then he played out in a very like, it's going to be my next one.
29:17
So he was so excited that I was an author
29:20
that this kid was in the ICU, intubated, sedated.
29:24
Things weren't going so well.
29:25
He wasn't blaming me.
29:27
Every person that walked in the door, he had bought my book on Amazon.
29:31
He every nurse, he's like, do you know who you're talking to right now?
29:35
This is so forget the forget.
29:37
Forget the good parents. You're I want you to hear me.
29:40
Some people aren't happy.
29:42
How? Like, have parents got an upset or.
29:44
No, if they haven't, that's terrific.
29:47
But just.
29:47
I want you to be fully transparent for our audience.
29:49
This isn't all fun and happiness.
29:52
I mean, tell us
29:53
some of those challenging patients that you see regarding the book now.
29:57
So, so far, I mean, being honest, it I haven't gotten the negative backlash.
30:03
I'm not saying that won't happen. I'm sure it will.
30:06
But and I'm on social media so people write nasty things.
30:10
That's just the you know, but it hasn't happened.
30:14
And when it does, it's going to be really hard.
30:16
You know, I'm going to be hurt and I'm going to probably need a therapist.
30:21
Yeah.
30:22
Doctor Lando, you have like 9000 people loving the book.
30:25
If one person gets upset, you'll be okay.
30:27
That's really great to know.
30:29
A couple more questions. What's next?
30:31
What's your third book going to be?
30:33
I can't wait to read it and I'm going to order “Hell and Back”
30:35
I promise you I'm going to I'm going to order it.
30:37
I want to see the trilogy. Give me a trilogy.
30:39
Do I get some royalties if I just gave you the idea of a trilogy?
30:43
It's very funny.
30:44
I mean, I so, so far for my, I have, I have been doing
30:50
a PowerPoint presentation on the twisty tales of pediatric ENT,
30:55
which are the cases as they roll in that I'm doing it more in a didactic way,
31:02
but obviously each of those cases still has the pearls of wisdom.
31:06
And so I am amassing enough for a third book.
31:11
Don't make fun of me, but
31:12
I really want it to be a TV series,
31:16
and that would be like one of my just like life fun, cool.
31:21
Like if this spun off into, you know, “The Pitt”-
31:24
like version of ENT, I think I'd be pretty happy.
31:28
So there's no third book or you're thinking about it?
31:31
You don't know a topic yet.
31:32
The first one was the personal journey, the second maybe the professional
31:35
and personal. You don't have a third one yet in mind?
31:38
I don't have a third one yet.
31:39
In like a different vein, it's more like, should I do like the, you know, the
31:46
the next in a series of “Breathless” - like “Still
31:49
Breathless” or “More Breathless”?
31:53
How far are we till Passover?
31:57
I was it just passed.
31:58
And during this Passover, I, I've,
32:02
I've spun into this direction like these conversations with you.
32:06
Lianne de Serres, who's my who's she's all over in the book like, you know,
32:11
so I talk about her a lot and she's my, as I call her,
32:14
“my buoy in the storm” and definitely my work wife.
32:17
She said to me the other day,
32:20
everything that I don't want to do just fuels your fire.
32:24
So I love podcasts, I love speaking, I love.
32:29
You’ve also been connecting with medical students.
32:31
Talk about that.
32:32
Yeah, I'm on my yeah, I just I, I
32:35
really, really wanted to go
32:38
like on, on the road in a way with these medical student
32:43
really honest discussions that they seem to thank me like crazy.
32:47
They say, you know, we get exposed to a lot of specialties in a formal way,
32:52
but nobody tells us the life like the deeper parts of the life.
32:55
When I've been talking, I just spoke at Columbia,
32:58
I've already spoken at Cornell, and I spoke at New York Medical College.
33:01
And what I end up talking to them about late night with pizza
33:05
in some tiny room is,
33:08
you know, when did I decide to get married?
33:11
How did I have a honeymoon?
33:13
The answer is no.
33:14
How did I figure out whether I could handle a surgical residency?
33:20
And a kid who watched my kid when the nanny didn't show up?
33:24
I get it.
33:24
So can people reach out to you
33:27
to have you speak to their med students, to have you speak to their residents?
33:31
Are you amenable to that? I really am.
33:34
I think what's actually been the the best is a med student.
33:38
They they can organize these med students
33:41
events so easily because they don't have to go through the whole system.
33:44
So they just find a room they have funding for usually,
33:48
like I said, like pizza and soda.
33:49
And then you just as a,
33:52
as a surgeon, you have to take your ego down actually
33:57
like 20 notches because only like 3 to 5 people are going to show up.
34:01
And I've learned now to not take that personally.
34:04
So those are not big attendance events because everyone's
34:08
pulled in a lot of directions.
34:09
But it's just a very fulfilling, wonderful experience.
34:13
And on my own time, usually late at night.
34:15
That's how I could do it. Yeah.
34:17
And one person's there for the pizza, the other for the soda.
34:20
So I know how hard that is.
34:21
But the book is amazing.
34:24
I want to give you the final word.
34:26
I mean, it's your time that you've given us today on a busy academic day.
34:31
The book is amazing.
34:32
Amazing.
34:33
I have a poker face.
34:34
This is my happy face. It's terrific.
34:37
Terrific, terrific.
34:38
I couldn't put it down and I've recommended it to nearly everybody.
34:42
Final thoughts, final words.
34:44
I'm so excited by you
34:47
finding a passion that is different than the beaten track.
34:50
But I will give you the final word.
34:52
Doctor Lando,
34:53
anything we haven't talked about that you want to address or bring up?
34:56
I think that in this world there's a lot of drive towards division.
35:01
Like, you got to have your professional life
35:04
and then you got to have you got to chunk out the other stuff.
35:08
And I guess I'm trying to figure out the way to integrate.
35:12
And I work my ass off.
35:15
I'm like, I'm the worker bee and I'm fine with that.
35:18
I'm like the workhorse worker bee.
35:20
I was never going to be the chairman.
35:22
I'm not saying I might not have elements that are inspiring, but that's just not
35:26
the person that I've become and I don't want to take away.
35:30
I want to add.
35:31
So you do have to you you do have to pursue your passions,
35:36
but you got to find the cracks because you can't
35:38
necessarily make the time, you know, separate.
35:42
And so that's what I'm saying.
35:44
Like, you can still do it,
35:45
follow your passion, but you got to find the ways to work it in.
35:49
Amazing.
35:49
How do people find “Breathless”?
35:53
Okay, so it's super easy.
35:55
It's available on Amazon.
35:56
Also I have a website and you can reach me through the website.
35:59
It's very easy.
36:02
www.DrTaliLando.com.
36:03
And my Gmail address is on there.
36:06
And I guess if I get too famous, I might be overwhelmed and have somebody
36:09
actually vet my emails, but as of now I do not have that.
36:13
So it's you can find me on Instagram @DrTaliLando or you can find me
36:19
on my website.
36:20
And all these ways you can find “Breathless” as well.
36:23
And there's an audio book for people that really don't have time to read,
36:26
which was another giant eight month passion project.
36:30
Also on that financial, you know, list, all from the same year
36:35
that I submitted as my small business and got a little deduction.
36:39
And and that also is really fun because I, I did it all myself.
36:42
And I got Doctor Rutter into a studio in Cincinnati with his New Zealand accent
36:48
to read the foreword, which I was quite proud of.
36:51
Well, thank you so much. This was awesome.
36:53
Highly, highly recommend the book and I'm glad.
36:56
Super glad I made a new friend.
36:57
Terrific, terrific book. Me too.
36:59
Dr. Tali Lando, thank you so much.
37:03
We hope today's We hope today’s episode sparked some fresh ideas.
37:05
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37:09
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37:11
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37:13
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37:14
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37:15
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37:19
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