Episode 77: Mastering Resilience in Biotech and Healthcare with Speaker and Author Mark Black

What can biotech experts learn from a patient who received a lifesaving heart and double lung transplant? Tune into this extended episode and find out.

You're listening to BIO from the Bayou, empowering biotech leaders with the tools, assets, and expertise to improve healthcare outcomes.

Each episode provides insights and information to expand your network, advance your product line, and help your company thrive.

Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Welcome back to BIO from the Bayou. I'm your host, Dr. Elaine Hamm, the executive in residence at Tulane School of Medicine.

And I'm James Zanewicz, the Chief Strategy Officer at Tulane School of Medicine.

And today's special guest is Mark Black. He's a resilience expert, speaker, coach, award-winning author, and president of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers. So, we're very excited to have you on the show, Mark. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, Mark, I wanna welcome you as well, and I think your story is truly inspiring. For those who are listening and don't know you yet, you received a life-saving heart and double lung transplant in 2002. And then went on to run marathons. And you're the second person I've met this week who've done that. So it's a theme going this week with people I'm meeting. But I'd like for you to share your health journey leading up to your transplants, and then what motivated you to become a resilience coach out of that?

I'm just gonna try and do this in, in a format that is suitable for a show and not—

Oh, we're, we're on, we're on, we're an unsuitable show. You're fine.

Yeah, we're very unsuitable.

It's fine. Well, I mean, you guys meant more in terms of brevity than language, but yeah. So it'll sound like it's gonna take a long time. I promise it won't, but we do have to go back to the beginning. So I was born with a, a heart defect. I had open heart surgery when I was hours old. So my 2 24-year-old parents, if you can imagine, had to watch their baby put in an incubator, rolled onto a helicopter, and medevaced immediately after birth to the children's hospital, which is about 3 hours away for open heart surgery. And they didn't see me for about 2 days because of course then at that, in, in those days, women who gave birth were actually allowed to recover in the hospital for a little while. So they had to follow down in the car a couple of days later. I had another open heart surgery when I was a year old. And then doctors said, kind of like, be prepared, it's going to be a rough ride and he'll probably need more surgery before he starts school. And I was really, really fortunate that it was 20-some-odd years before I needed another surgery. Unfortunately, at that time it was a really big one. So when I was 23, at that point I'm suffering from something called congenital heart disease, yes, but also congestive heart failure. So pulmonary artery pressures are very high. The heart is thick and stiff and pretty good at pumping, not so good at filling back up. And they said the only thing that's going to fix this is a transplant. And if we just transplant the heart, The artery pressures in the lungs are still going to be there. So we need to do both, or as the surgeons called it, the whole engine block. So I was listed for a transplant, and I'm in the East Coast of Canada in a place called Moncton, New Brunswick. The closest medical center that could do the transplant was in Toronto, which is about a 15-hour drive. And because of the lifespan of donated organs, In order to be put on the transplant list, I had to move. So my dad and I packed our bags. I have 3 younger brothers. My younger brothers and my mom stayed back home. Dad and I moved to Toronto to wait for a transplant. We waited there for, well, all told about a year, but the first 6 months out of the hospital at a family friend's house. And then my condition got so kind of perilous that they wanted to put me in hospital and monitor me 24/7. So I spent the last, actually almost 6 months.

Wow.

on the waiting list in hospital. And then on September 6th, 2002, at 10:15 PM, not that I'll remember the day forever or anything.

Right.

We got the call and I was taken into surgery at 5 in the morning and came out around 3 in the afternoon. Was in the ICU for a couple of weeks. And it was during the time in the ICU when I could kind of breathe easily for the first time, and I couldn't remember how long. But most powerfully, I could feel regular sinus rhythm heartbeat, which I had not felt my entire life. My heart had various abnormalities and various rhythm disturbances so that I basically, I always, I always used to say my heart beats whenever the heck it feels like it. And thankfully it's often enough to keep me alive. So all of a sudden this like strong rhythmic steady heartbeat is going in my chest. And I remember thinking, I wonder what's possible now that wasn't possible before. And I don't know where it came from because it doesn't make any sense, but I decided, I wonder if I could run a marathon. And so the journey began, like mentally the journey began that day.

Wow.

Physically the journey began a little while after that. But basically I went from rehab post-surgery to beginning the training for a 5K and then a 10K and then a half marathon. Took about 2 and a half years to get to the marathon.

And so, how old were you when you did the marathon, the first marathon?

I was 26 when I did the marathon.

Wow. And listening to your story, I mean, I think about sort of as we think about different disease process, being a scientist and then being in drug development, we think a lot of the disease itself or the problem itself or the infection or, you know, very, very focused on the physical piece of the disease.

Yeah.

But there's so much of a mental part, and we've seen this time and time again in studies where the mental piece, whether it's calming stress levels or meditation, can lower the stress response, which has a number of different effects of impacting the immune system and helping in the healing process. But I never— I had been in the hospital for a serious illness myself, and I remember specifically, like, don't cry. Or you're going to upset your immune system. And thinking through— I actually, I don't know if you guys remember Fraggle Rock or not, but I remember picturing those little construction guys, the little dozers, trying to picture them physically repairing my body as part of that process. And that gave me also something to think about because that mental piece is really, really important for that process. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the—

Yeah.

The physical pieces, but also really the mental challenges that you face as you navigated the process that you described, which I know was a very long journey? Sure.

Yeah. I mean, rollercoaster ride, I think, is the short answer. The more verbose answer is, I mean, at least when I was listed for transplant, I was actually very hopeful, primarily because we weren't sure I was going to get listed at all. So, when I was first diagnosed with kind of end-stage congestive heart failure, the doctor said, This is the doctor here at home who was referring me, said, look, I'll send the file, but they're probably not gonna put you on the list. You have congenital heart disease. You're small. So I'm, I'm 5 feet tall. I weigh 115 pounds. Like, I'm, I'm a tough— Yeah. Physical match from a donor perspective. You know, you have all the reasons why they shouldn't do it, except that you're young.

Hmm.

So you're high risk, and high risk means risking success rates, and you're a tough match. So they said, he said, like, they probably won't list you, and if they do, they're probably not gonna find an organ in time. But we can send the file if you want. And I remember thinking like, well, you just told me that I had about a year to live if we don't do this. So yeah, like, let's send it because what do I have to lose here?

That's still so devastating to hear though. I mean, just like, yeah, good luck. I mean, that's gotta be—

Yeah, no, for sure. It was a joke, but it's true that I've been fortunate to have been born with my illness. And what I mean by that is I I grew up in hospital. I, yeah, it was totally normal for me that you visited a cardiologist 4 times a year. Like, that's what people did. Like, I didn't understand. I think I was 7 before I realized, oh, not everybody has a giant scar down their chest like I do.

Right. Yeah.

Right. And that's thanks to 2 parents who made a lot of really smart decisions about how they decided to treat me and raise me, and in that they treated me like a normal kid and not like a fragile thing. And the fact that I knew it was coming— we all— we knew transplant was in the future like a decade before. We just didn't know when. So you're never quite ready, much like, you know, when you're dealing with a loved one who's in the end stage of their life and you know that death is coming, but you're still never ready when it actually happens. It's kind of like that.

Yeah.

So that helped. But yeah, it was still super intense. And then when they're saying, well, I don't know that we can really even put you on the list. I was kind of flabbergasted because one of the things that we are kind of spoiled with, I guess, in Canada, for all of the flaws that our system has, and it has many, access is not one of them. Like, you might wait a long time, but everybody gets access to everything.

Yeah.

And so the idea that, like, there's this surgery that we can do that will save you, but you might not even be able to get the chance to wait and maybe get a donor was kind of like mind-blowing to me.

Well, that all comes down to, I think, how you approach it from a mental state, which I think is a lot of what you do, right? Where many people would've heard what you heard and been like, oh, it's not gonna happen. But you were like, I'm here and there's a chance. And that's how you approached it.

And yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, that comes from basically from the first days of self-awareness. I was battling something, right? And so it was always kind of like, okay, here's a new hurdle. Let's figure out how to solve this problem. And again, I think I owe a great deal of that to my 2 phys ed teacher parents.

Now the marathon makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, and they both coached, right? And so it's kind of how they always had that philosophy of like, Everything is a problem to solve and there's a solution to the problem. And so when we face a problem, we don't go throw our hands in the air. We go, what's the solution? Like, what do we need to do?

I think that's a great way to think about it because I tend to think in decision trees. So even if a negative result kind of happens, it's like, okay, well, now I've just branched off into this area and I'm going to go solve this problem now. But I think that coach piece of having a patient advocate in your corner and somebody that can coach you through it, but also be the person on your team fighting for you as you face all of the doctors and the many hospitals is such an important piece, I imagine.

I often think about how challenging that aspect of it was, just navigating the medical system in general. And then I think about, we did that with my 2 parents who have master's degrees. I have a bachelor's degree. Like, we're educated people and resourceful people and not wealthy, but doing fine. And It was challenging for us. So I can only imagine what it's like for the person with a high school education or less and/or doesn't have resources and/or is too passive to ask the questions or whatever it is. Because we learned again, because from day one, we learned very early on that we're not really too concerned about whether it's offensive or polite or whatever.

Mm-hmm.

We're going to ask the questions. We're going to question the person with the medical degree about why they're doing this thing. And did you check this thing? And have you talked to the other doctor who said this. And the number of times that we caught stuff or that we made them aware of something that they missed in the file or they weren't aware of or somebody hadn't noted down or whatever turned out to be really, really important.

I think it's great. Well, do you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can evolve healthcare to help minimize, maybe eliminate some of those challenges for patients that don't necessarily have the resources like you described, of maybe coming from a lower economic status or not having parents or just not knowing what to do and knowing that they can ask questions. Do you have some thoughts on that?

Well, I mean, I think the most critical thing is exactly that. It's to understand that at the end of the day, this is your body and the decisions that are going to be made are going to affect you more than they affect anybody else. And to acquiesce to somebody else because they have more education, purely because they have more education without understanding the why behind it, is not being responsible for your own care. You know, I don't think any of the I won't even call them mistakes. I'll just say there were things where decisions were made differently once they had all the information.

Right.

That would not maybe have happened if we just didn't raise the point and go, and look, last time we said, what about? And they're like, yeah, no, we know that. And here's why we're doing that instead. Okay, great. Right? Or even, yeah, I get it, but we disagree and we think we should do this way. And okay, great. You're the expert. As long as we're all factoring in all the same data, I'm cool with that. I just wanna make sure that the whole picture. So here's an example. In our system where I live, we have a French language hospital board and we have an English language hospital board. They're run by the same government department, but they don't talk to each other. So if you have a test in one hospital, you can't count on the fact that the doctor at the other hospital can see that test result, even though that's insane. Right?

Yeah.

So you just learn to be like, okay, well, make sure that you saw that. Like, they can access it if they go looking, but it may be in the chart, right? So it's stuff like that where it's just a matter of speaking up and asking the question. And again, I think we're better at it today than maybe a generation or two ago where people were just like, well, the person with the white coat is on a pedestal next to God and we don't question what they say.

But it's called the practice of medicine for a reason. Like, Doctors aren't gods, you know.

No, they're not.

They're highly trained, but they're not perfect. And I think that's a huge thing we have to learn to remember. And one of the reasons Elaine and I love working with Tulane so much is our doctors have kind of the mantra of making healthcare simple, personal, and accessible. And that doesn't mean it's perfect, but they try and be better. And one of the reasons why I like working in a healthcare system is for the access I can get to friends, family, and people I know. And I always encourage people, if you have a problem and you know somebody who's part of a system, Call them because it's amazing what a difference just knowing somebody who can advocate for you makes. And should it be that way? No, but it, it does help.

Well, I think having an academic medical center especially puts a mindset of physicians of they're still learning and there's still more to understand about disease, even though we know a lot and there's lots of books we have read and journal articles that we have digested. There's still more to be done. And I think that makes them a little more open to the questions that patients ask of like, have you thought about this? Because I mean, when we think about drug development, if you treat one patient, you've treated one patient. That doesn't necessarily mean that a drug that works great for me is going to work great for someone else. Everybody has a completely different physiological and genetic makeup. And so being willing to ask the questions of like, I know that that's what that says about this patient. this disease doesn't mean it applies to me necessarily. And have you thought about that? I think is a really important point, Mark. That's great.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And where I had my transplant was a university hospital and there's no question it's a learning environment. And so very, very rarely was a question that we asked taken in an offensive way. It was always like they wanted that, right? That was part of the process. And similarly, I was also very quick to raise my hand anytime one of the doctors said, look, we've got, you know, a 4th-year medical student who wants to come in and listen to your heart because they've never heard what this particular disease sounds like. And I'd be like, please, right? Because if that's going to help them spot it in somebody else later, fantastic, right? Like, that's, that's what this is all about.

100%.

And I think one of the reasons that— one of many reasons we're excited to talk to you is kind of the Canadian-New Orleans connection, because we have a tremendous Acadian population. Down here as well. So, the ties between Canada and the Gulf South are huge and rich in history. But I wanted to ask, because you've spoken across all of North America, have you noticed any cultural similarities or differences in how the northern and southern halves of our continent approach resilience in healthcare? What are some of the things that you see?

Ooh, that's interesting. Look, there's organizational resilience, but what I'm focused mainly on is how the individual can be more resilient within the system. And, you know, our systems are very different and yet similar in, in many ways. And, and the similarity from, from a practitioner's perspective, whether that's a doctor, nurse, whatever, there are so many limiting factors for them. And, you know, the frustrations are similar in terms of, look, I don't know a medical professional who doesn't do what they do primarily because they have a desire to help other people. I mean, Yeah, hopefully they're well compensated. In some cases they are, and in some cases they're woefully undercompensated. But regardless, the motive usually is quite good. And that can be challenging because when you care a lot and then you're in a system that doesn't allow you to do everything you would like to do because of the constraints of time and patient load and et cetera, it's a really challenging mental space for people to live in all the time.

Mm-hmm.

And so what I try and help people with is to do that in a way that they can leave work feeling like they've made an impact and are able to somehow let go of or forgive themselves or whatever you want to call it for the things that they couldn't do, because they're never going to be able to do it all. And there are going to be people that they can't help, and there's going to be things that they screw up because they're human.

Right.

And if they let those things defeat them, then they can't help the next person tomorrow.

That next step after defeat is always the most important step of being able to take a setback. I think about that a lot as an entrepreneur. We've had a lot of failed companies and failed drugs. And it's— you know, I always read those before I even became an entrepreneur, which I never thought I ever was going to be that. I would have laughed in your face if you told me that, even probably 10 years ago. I would have laughed because, like, all of the things I had read about entrepreneurs was like, you have to be— a risk-taker.

Right.

And you have to be brash and all of this, you know, type of personality. And I was like, well, that is not me. I am not a risk-taker whatsoever. And I, now having gotten thrown into it and then experienced failure and setback, I realize actually the reason why I am an entrepreneur is because of the piece of resiliency. Because I think resiliency is what pushes you through the roller coaster, as you described. I called science in general as a roller coaster because you have these great highs of Great data and then just soul-crushing lows of just like, if I have to set up this one more time, or if this doesn't work, you know, it's just so hard. But the next step is always important. A lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs, and I would love to see if you have any sort of general thoughts of how people could develop resiliency, because it's not a— it's not a genetic trait or anything. It's something that— it's a skill. It's a skill. And I'd love to hear your thoughts of how that's something that people could work on or hone.

100%. My whole book, The Resilience Roadmap, is premised on 2 things. One, this is a learned skill set. Absolutely. So the myth that this is biology, that some people are just resilient and other people are not, is a myth. It's just not true. The people that are resilient practice a set of skills and hone them over time and hone a mindset over time that is one of problem solver, adapter, overcomer, all of those things. The second fundamental principle is resilience is not bouncing back. Like, that's the analogy that we hear all the time, and I think it's baloney.

Yeah.

For a couple of reasons. One, there's no going back. Like, is it?

Yeah.

We all understand, right, that the world has fundamentally changed from— let's use COVID as an example because it's a universal one.

Yeah.

We are not going back to 2019. It does not exist anymore, and it never will. For better or worse, it is what it is. And we are fundamentally different now than we were. So to suggest to people your job is to, you know, if you're going to try and be more resilient, you should be bouncing back from whatever challenge you have implies you need to be the yesterday version of you before the trauma or the challenge or the whatever. And what we're really talking about is real resilience is about post-traumatic growth. It's about how do you take the challenge, leverage it, And use it so that you're a better version of you in some way because you've got this new set of skills and experiences.

Yeah.

That can inform new decisions so that you're, you know, wiser, smarter, whatever, than you were before. And so it drives me bonkers. And they're like, oh, let's just bounce back.

And I'm like, well, no.

Oh, well, you're bouncing back to where you were. Everybody else is 4 steps ahead because they were using the screw-up to innovate and learn and adapt and do something even cooler.

Yeah, that data set is what I rely on. Even if I start something I've never done before, I always go, well, you've done things that you've never done before, and it was fine. And I say that very specifically. I didn't say it worked out. It didn't maybe work out the way I thought it was going to, but I made it to this point, right? And so it may not work out the way I think it's going to, but you made it through and are better for it. And so I rely on that data set to Try new things that if I just relied on, I'm too scared to, nah, you'll, you'll get through it. You'll be fine. Of course, now I, a 20-year-old Elaine would not, you know, be able to say something like that at all. But then 20-year-old Elaine didn't have that dataset to build off of. And you've, you've developed quite a dataset yourself from birth of knowing that, yeah, if I can do XYZ, I can do this too.

A phrase that I give people in the keynote presentations that I do a lot, I say, just write this down and use this whenever you're doubting yourself. And very simply, if I can do that, then I can do this. And that, that is whatever that hard thing was for you, because we've all got them, right? Was it you went through your divorce? You built a company that failed? You whatever. Like, we've got a laundry list of stuff we screwed up and failed at, right? And then if you look back and go, well, geez, I did all— I'm the same person that did all that stuff. Actually, I'm a better version of that person because hopefully I learned something from it.

Right.

Oh, right. 99 times out of 100, whatever you're facing tomorrow is not going to be the hardest thing you've ever faced in your life. So there are many times where I'm facing some new thing, and I'll be like, well, wait a minute. You're the guy that did this. So even though you don't know the answer to this, you've probably got the skills, and you can probably figure— one of my favorite quotes— I wish it was mine. It's not. Marie Forleo says, everything is figureoutable.

Hmm.

The mindset at which I try and approach everything in life is like, I don't— I might not have the answer, but I can figure out the answer.

And it may not be the endpoint you want, but it can be an endpoint, right? You can get somewhere.

Yeah.

So much of success comes from iterative processes, right? It's not like— the people who get stuck are the people that sit there going, I need to have the perfect answer before I take action, as opposed to, let's try this. Oh, nope, that was like 25% right, but it wasn't right. But from there, I can now try something else that's gonna be that much better, right? And then version 7 is gonna be the thing that's actually awesome.

Yeah. Analysis paralysis is a killer, and it's something that I had to get over myself because I want to think something to death and be perfect. And before I speak, I want to have the perfect thought, the perfect, you know, whatever it may be.

And I have no such problem, which is why Elaine and I pair really well.

I hear a producer laughing in the background.

Yes.

Ian's like, that's the truth.

Is it true?

It's true.

Elaine and I pair at parties really well. I make her meet 5 new people, and she makes me leave and go home at a reasonable hour. So it's really good when we're at a work event. We're a perfect pair.

And if I gave myself a minute to think about it, I wouldn't want to do it. If I went through and like, oh, I'm going to say something stupid, and do I even have enough small talk in the back of my pocket to even make it through this networking reception? I wouldn't be able to. But the analysis paralysis is such a killer. It's better to do something 25% than zero.

I coach other speakers, and that's what I tell them all the time is you are never going to become a better speaker by rewriting the speech 17 times. You're going to become a better speaker by delivering the presentation 17 times, right? So freaking stand up there and stutter, screw it up, and forget stuff, and do all of that stuff. They're like, well, I watch your video and it's so awesome. I'm like, yeah, because that's the 800th presentation that I've done.

Exactly.

It's not an accident. Right? It's work. I, I hope I'm pretty good at this point, but yeah, you should have seen version 6. Yeah.

And I think talking about failures is a big piece of that too. Me being cool with Oak and talking about that. James hears that a lot from me about failures.

So, yeah. Well, we've talked a lot about resilience and the way of being resilient, which is, A, where have you been the last 4 years in New Orleans? Because, and where were you on New Year's when we needed you the most? This is like really helpful because I'll tell you, I've— our city is built on resilience because we have to be, because, you know, hurricanes, this, that, the other bad things, the, the terrorist tragedy New Year's this year, and it's the first time where I've ever felt in this city where people were exhausted of being told to be resilient, because Carnival season started all of like 5 days later, and people were pouring in the city for a good time, and we just weren't ready. And it was interesting.

You were told to bounce back.

Yeah, it's like, it's like bounce back. And we're like, well, we're moving forward, we're not bouncing back. Which is, you know, I think the interesting difference is like you're not bouncing to where you were, but you're moving forward in a way. And we just— every article I saw was, this is one of the times where like we're tired of it. We had COVID, we had Hurricane Ida, you know, Katrina years ago, the anniversary is coming up. We just need a beat, 'cause it was almost more personal in many ways.

Okay.

And to have to be resilient, what we just talked about was a lot of adverse events, and adversity is ever-present, whether that's bringing an idea to fruition as a scientist like Elaine or a CEO, training and completing a marathon like you did, getting through a healthcare treatment or inventing the next healthcare treatment, starting a company. There's adversity in all those places. Do you see commonality in how adversity arises for different people in different fields, or do you see You know, I guess it's kind of an obtuse question, but do you see any similarities in the kinds of challenges that come up and then how we apply that resilience that you talked about? Sure.

I mean, I think the greatest commonality is that no matter what the challenge is, a great percentage of it is happening between your ears, right?

So, uh-oh.

Most of the time, the greatest obstacle to you solving a problem is your resistance to the fact that there's a problem, right?

Yeah.

So I was having a conversation with a speaker friend, actually, and we were trying to capture, like, what I was— we're also working on my brand, actually, and we're trying to figure out, like, okay, well, what's— what are the things that I want people to come away with? And what are the people that, you know— and I blurted this thing out. She's like, oh my gosh, you gotta write that down. And I said, well, what if it's supposed to be hard? And she was— she said, well, tell me about that. And I said, well, I think that life, work, all of that stuff is supposed to be difficult. And the reason it's supposed to be difficult is that if it was challenging, it doesn't cause us to grow. If it's easy, it doesn't engage us. If you think about the things in your life, the moments in life that you were proud of yourself, or you think about the times that you talk about when you're hanging out with your friends and the stories that you tell and all that, we never tell the story of like, oh, I planned to do this thing and it went really well and everything was great. Like, that's never how it goes, right?

Yeah. It's like—

There's no story then, right? I planned to do this, and then there was this nightmare, and then this happened, and then this stuff, right? And there's like this whole big journey. But on the other side of that was maybe not even success, quote unquote, but I'm still here, and here's what I learned. And so if we just fundamentally are able to convince ourselves when we face the next thing, even if we don't maybe want it, that, okay, something good is going to come out of this. You can say there's a reason for it or not, whatever, but I'm going to use this constructively. I am going to decide that there is some good to be found here, a lesson to be found here, some growth opportunity to be found here. And I remember one of my favorite books ever is Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl, psychologist who lived in Auschwitz. And as I read that book, he talks a lot about this. And I thought to myself, I can't imagine a human experience worse than that. And he was able to somehow find a light in the darkest of the dark. And so that, to me, means it's not Pollyanna to say there is something in every situation, right, if we're willing to find it. And that doesn't mean deny the dark's there either. Toxic positivity is a real thing. But— Agree.

Right?

So it's acknowledge the problem and empathetic about the problem, but also say, but we're not going to sit in the problem forever. We're gonna say, what are we gonna do about it?

Yeah.

It reminds me of something my dad said when I was younger that I thought was an insult at the time. Somebody had complimented, I guess, me on something that it was something adversity. I don't even remember what it was, but something adversity that I'd overcome. And he goes, well, you can't put gasoline in a wheelbarrow. And I, I, you think you have to build that engine between your brain, like you said, where you actually have something that runs when you put gas in versus a wheelbarrow where it just sits there. And it, it was like 20 years before I realized that was a compliment. I was like, Why is he calling me a wheelbarrow? That's horrible. But he wasn't. He was calling me an engine.

But, you know, when you're, when you're 20, that doesn't click in your head.

Before Elaine finishes out of it, I wanted to give Elaine an opportunity because you mentioned something that is a problem, and Elaine does nothing but find and solve problems that you had identified when you were in Canada. And you have the 2 boards, the French board and the English board, who had separate medical records. But Elaine and her work through the AIH is trying to solve some of those problems. It has a white paper coming out. Right now, and I thought maybe she could tell you a little bit about that because you might be interested.

Well, in fact, I kind of want to go back and edit it just a bit just because when we were talking about something, the unified patient health record, which is sounds like a dream, right? Or the holy grail. Go through and we outline sort of all of the challenges that exist to bring forth a unified patient record. We thought, you know, and we had talked about sort of the, you know, moving from different country to a different country. The issues of language barriers and being able to translate that. But I hadn't thought about that piece of just within your own country, having even across a simple province border is gonna be someone that, that has a different language. And that's, that's an interesting challenge. We even within Canada of being able to unify a patient record too. And so it's a hard challenge though, because there's a lot of different health systems. Every state is a little different. Every province, I'm sure in Canada is a little bit different as well.

Yep. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, it's brilliant that we're working on that because it's so critically important. I mean, just to give you another practical example, so I had a heart and double lung transplant in Toronto at the Toronto General Hospital. But my cardiologist that follows me regularly is in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so 2 provinces away. Then I have a lung team in Toronto. Then I have a nephrologist who follows me here now in my city because the kidneys are starting to take a beating after 20 years of those medications.

Sure.

And then I've got a family doctor and, and, and. And so all of these people have input, all of these people have decisions they're making, and really the end coordinator of all that is the guy with no medical—

Is you.

I mean, it's like no medical degree at all, right? So anything we can do to help them help each other is super valuable because things get mixed. I had a very recently had A medication prescribed by one, and it was the pharmacist who went, yeah, but you're also on this and this, and because of that, you should not be on this. And they probably just missed it, right? And again, it's not like— it's not medical malpractice, it's being human and not having all the information. But those catches can be life or death.

And pharmacists are unsung heroes in that a lot, because that is literally their job. Like, pay attention to that.

Yeah, something happened with my mom as well. Just like, hey, you know, ask your pharmacist, because they are the ones that toil through organic chemistry, and they're Really the, the next step between giving you that medication and you taking that medication. So use them as that piece of like, is everything gonna be okay if I take this medication plus this medication? So.

Mm-hmm.

It would be nice to have a simple record. I mean, I also find my mom printing out pieces of paper that have her records from other places, and, and that's, that's where we're at now. And that's not okay. We shouldn't have to bring a bag of medicine with us to the emergency room just in case they don't have a record of everything that we take. And so. Well, we could go on and on about that, I'm sure. So I'm sure you have loads of stories on that front, given that you've been navigating the hospital system since birth.

So.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We very, very early on, like I was before I was a teenager, maybe my mom had the idea to create basically our own version of my medical record. So it was like a 3-page document, I think. And it listed the medications that I was on, all the doctors that saw me regularly with their contact info, my major surgeries. just kind of like everything summarized in a couple of pieces of paper. And I carried a copy, and she carried a copy, and we would update it every so often. And the number of times that we're traveling, and I'm going to the ER 'cause I— whatever, and the doctor goes, can you give us a medical history? And we just go, here, like, make a photocopy of this.

Yeah.

A, it saves a bunch of time.

Yeah.

Right? And B, it ensures that information is accurate. Transferred more accurately than, you know, oral history.

Especially in time of distress, you know, if you're in there.

Yeah, I might list my medications and forget one or something, right? Like, yeah. Yeah.

Do you have any last words you'd want to leave with our listeners today, or even just James and I, of understanding how to navigate resiliency or the healthcare system, or maybe both?

To me, resilience is about Moving as quickly as possible from 2 fundamental or critical moments that happen whenever we're facing adversity, large or small. And so when I say that, it's like it can be anything from the tiniest thing, like someone cuts you off in traffic, to a cancer diagnosis or worse, right? And it's— the first moment is, oh no.

Yeah.

Like, oh no, this thing happened. I had a plan for today, for my life, or whatever, and all of a sudden things are clearly going to be different. And then the other moment is, now what? Like, what am I going to do? And the problem is, between those 2 moments, there is a gap. And the gap can be 10 seconds, or that gap can be 10 years, depending on your level of resistance and how long it takes you to process what's going on and decide that you're going to do something. And some people never do anything. We also know people who something happened in their life, and they're really still kind of stuck in that time years later.

Yeah.

And so the resilient person goes from, oh, no, to now what, at a faster pace than other people. Again, they still go through the process, right? So the resilient person is not like, nothing bothers me, right? It's not— I mean, maybe if you can meditate on a mountain 24 hours a day, then you can just let everything, you know, blow through you or whatever. I always joke, like, when someone cuts me off, I still go, grrr. The difference is I do it for 10 seconds and then get on with my day. I don't carry it with me to the work— to my office for the rest of the day.

Are you hearing that, James, by the way?

That's why it's healthy to have road rage, because you get it out in the car and get it over with, and then you feel fine. See, he made my point, not yours.

I don't know if that should be the takeaway here.

But that's such a— that time— wow, that time difference. That's a great point. That gap between that decision— I never thought about that gap— is a really— it can be seconds, it can be years. That's a huge point right there.

The amount. And so the gap is made up of time and energy. This is what I tell people. I'm like, okay, every ounce of energy and every second of time that you spend in that Right? So the quicker we can get about the business of saying, let me start solving the problem, we're devoting resources towards the problem that we're trying to solve, as opposed to just spinning our wheels and wasting that time and energy on stuff that, well, we can't control. Like, I wish this didn't happen, and—

Sure.

This is making me mad, and that person's an idiot, and like, whatever that stuff is that's maybe true but not constructive.

Not helpful. Yeah, this is why I'm moving you forward.

One of Elaine's favorite things to me and Holly— I have a group of conference wives who are like, why do you let those people or that thing live rent-free in your head? Right? Kick it out. Give space for other things. And it's— I think if you surround yourself with people who will challenge you, which I'm fortunate to have done, that's where you start to learn that resilience a little better too, is because they help challenge you when you're not being.

Yeah, remind you.

100%. My My mom is— so I was in the hospital for about 3 weeks, like when I was fully admitted and you're going to be here until you get a transplant kind of thing, which was an intense experience at first. You're like, okay, I'm going to be here indefinitely. And statistically, I'm not leaving this room. Like, I'm going to die here. So naturally, I was probably in a depression and probably I was freaking out and angry and then sad and then all those stages of grief. And my mom sat me down one day in a moment that at the time, for me, was like, how dare you? And for her, in retrospect, probably took a ton of courage.

Yeah.

But she said, Mark, you have to make a decision. You can decide to feel sorry for yourself, and I empathize, and I get it, and you're entitled, but it's not gonna help you feel any better about this situation. And you can't change where you are, but you can change how you feel about it. So you either decide to be grateful for what you still have, And focus on what you control, or you decide to be angry and bitter about what's happening with you and suffer even more. And it's up to you. And then she shut up and she walked away. And, and it took me 3 weeks to figure out what, you know, I always joke, it took me 3 weeks for me to decide it was my idea and then it was a good idea.

I love that.

And then I put it in my book and there you go.

Thanks, Mom. Well, and that is a perfect place to leave this because we'd like to tell our readers to go check out your book as well and learn more about resiliency because I think it's such an important piece of whether you're in research or becoming a patient yourself, that resiliency can be such an important piece of the healthcare journey. And Mark, thank you so much for talking with us. And as always, we'll have more information about Mark, his work, his book in our show notes today.

It's been so fantastic. And, you know, I know Ian's going to have every link there is in our notes. He's great at that, but—

It's going to be a long one.

Yeah. Yeah. This is why we have folks like you who Like, why do you have people outside biotech? Because you learn the most from people outside of a field. So much of what you talked about applies to what our audience is listening to, but now they're hearing it from a different perspective, and it might change the lens in which they look at things, and that might make them more resilient, which I love.

That's really cool and a great compliment, and I appreciate it. It's been lots of fun hanging out with all of you. And yeah, I agree 100%. I learned so much from people in other fields and people who are smarter and wiser than me in different areas, and that's where we get the different the different perspectives that can sometimes turn light bulbs on. So that's really fun.

Thanks for joining us for Bio from the Bayou, and we hope you'll join us again.

To never miss the latest updates in biotech, hit the subscribe button now.

We'll catch you on our next episode of Bio from the Bayou.