By Taryn Hartman
Legal News
In Dr. Harold Gallick’s office at Henry Ford Macomb Hospital in Clinton Township, artistic renderings of hearts (the Valentine’s kind, not the pulmonary) hang on the walls across from diplomas from the University of Michigan and Wayne State University School of Medicine and a host of framed certificates from medical organizations and certification boards.
A plastic model of the human heart, which he’ll grab and disassemble on his desk to illustrate exactly what he’ll do in an operation scheduled for two days later, sits atop a stuffed bookcase in the corner.
Just outside the door, two representatives from a medical supply company have laid out scalpels, scissors and other sharp surgical implements for Gallick and his Heart and Vascular Institute colleagues to examine and choose from. And next to his computer screen is an open textbook and legal pad on which he’s started an outline.
“I have class tonight,” he says.
But it’s not a book on cardiothoracic surgery, which Gallick has practiced for the last two decades, for the re-certification he’ll complete later this year. It’s on estates and trusts. For his law class at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, where Gallick has been a student in the night program for the last four years and will complete his juris doctorate next May.
“I’ve got all the programs running at once,” Gallick says of his balancing act between medicine and law, generally thought of as two drastically different disciplines — medicine appealing to the science-minded among us and the left-brained being more drawn to the law. “I have conflicted programs.”
Gallick is slight with a soothing voice that is easy to imagine putting an anxious patient at ease. Juggling the competing demands of being a surgeon and a student is as challenging as anyone would imagine, but Gallick embraces it without a trace of complaint or frustration.
“Medicine is very controlled; your path is set for you,” he says on a warm Tuesday afternoon. “All you got to do is pay attention, follow the path, and it’s easy to achieve a goal there. Easy…” Gallick rolls his eyes at the assumption and searches for a replacement word. “Achievable. It’s more concrete.”
The volume, density, and nature of the reading for law school and the vast interpretation of it all came as a shock to someone who was used to following established procedures and getting the same results every time for the better part of his life.
“I like to say, in medicine, we’re looking for answers, and the law is looking for questions,” he says.
Gallick doesn’t leave the doctor in the O.R. when he steps into the law classroom, however: “If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it like a heart surgeon would. I’m going to do it the best I possibly can. I’m not going to do it halfway,” he says definitively.
The attitude has paid off: Gallick has scored Book Awards from the School of Law for having the highest grade in at least four classes, including health care law. It also plays a role in time management.
“Again, it’s that goal-oriented approach. You just kind of compartmentalize and prioritize,” he says. “When I’m operating, that’s the only thing that I’m doing. I just devote full attention there.”
He uses the same approach when studying, which he estimates takes up a good 20 to 24 hours of his week.
And the scalpel cuts both ways: Gallick frequently finds that he now brings a fresh legal perspective to his role as the hospital’s patient safety officer and to the number of committees he sits on. This winter, he won a writing competition sponsored by the State Bar of Michigan’s Health Care Law Section for a paper on community hospitals voluntarily disclosing medical errors, the inspiration for which drew heavily from his surgical background.
“He had this very strong belief that you would improve patient care and doctor-patient relations” by improving and changing disclosure policies, says Karen Henning, director of UDM’s Writing for Publications program, who assisted Gallick with the writing process. “He was able to understand it from the perspective of being a doctor with patients.”
Henning was amazed by Gallick’s seamless ability to move between the worlds of medicine and academia during the course of a single day; she often talked to Gallick about his paper at 7 a.m. before his rounds and then 12 hours later after he’d marinated on it during a day at the hospital.
“You don’t have that many M.D.s coming to law school,” Henning says, and she speaks fondly of Gallick’s low-key approach to what he’s doing: “It’s very calm, it’s very measured and he just gets it done.”
In two days, on Thursday, Gallick will arrive at the hospital around 6:30 a.m. for a surgery scheduled for 8 a.m.; after spending a good chunk of his day in the O.R., he’ll head downtown for two evening classes that will run until around 9:50 p.m., arriving back home to Bloomfield Hills around 10:30 p.m.
“It’s like the old days” of his residency, which for a heart surgeon is five years of general surgery followed by three in the cardiothoracic unit before at “35 years old, finally starting a job.”
Gallick’s support team at Henry Ford now tries to schedule more difficult cases for the mornings when he doesn’t have to be in class later, and his workload has dropped from 100 surgeries per year to around 70 since starting law school.
There have been a few instances when Gallick has had to leave UDM to take care of a patient back at the hospital, since Henry Ford is a community health system that handles its own overnight care and doesn’t rely on medical residents for follow-up with patients.
“Patient care has to come before everything, because it’s somebody else’s life,” Gallick says. “That’s what you sign up for when you go the medical route. You’ve got to put that person’s life before yours. So if I have to miss a class for a sick patient, I have to miss a class.”
Two major motivations propelled Gallick toward law school; the first was the legal issues that came up in his medical practice dealing with regulations, government insurance issues, liability, and health care reform policy.
“I think that a lot of policy is made by people who understand policy but don’t understand medicine or health care,” Gallick says. “People make these policies from a business perspective, from a mass-numbers perspective, and don’t understand that there’s a patient at the end of that policy. Somebody’s own personal life and health is going to be affected.”
The second motivator was what drives most other professionals to start saving for a Florida beach house instead of investing in a new degree: retirement.
“Heart surgery, I think, is pretty finite,” says Gallick, who will turn 55 this year. “I don’t want to reach a point in time where my skill isn’t what it should be and put people in jeopardy. Some surgeons retire at 50, some retire at 80, and I don’t know where my date will be, but I can’t imagine not having something to do on a daily basis. Making a difference in the world or in somebody else’s life or something.”
Why Gallick wants to be a lawyer is an explanation similar to why he wanted to become a doctor. He was 12 when the first heart transplant was performed in 1967, which he remembers making a huge impression on him and helped decide his career early on.
“Heart surgery is sort of my lifetime sort of thing,” Gallick says.
Wherever he ends up post-graduation, Gallick hopes to continue practicing both medicine and law once he takes the bar next spring. (“I’m going to be the most tested man in Michigan,” he joked earlier — in addition to this year’s cardiothoracic re-cert, he recently re-certified in general surgery for the second time.)
At least for a while, “I’m not ready to leave the operating room yet,” he says.
His desire to do both is largely attributed to two things that continue to appeal to Gallick: “growth, growing, learning,” which helps explain law school, and interacting with patients, whom he speaks about deeply.
“To hold somebody’s heart in your hand, to really make life-and-death decisions…” he begins.
“It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of hard work. But when they come back, when you do their post-operative visit — I’ve been to a couple of my patients’ weddings. A fellow has a heart attack and I have to do emergency surgery and 30 days later he’s walking his daughter down the aisle and he’s crying when he sees me there. Those kinds of things are just incredibly fulfilling. It makes all the bad stuff worthwhile.
“Surgery in the chest, there’s just an elegance to it. There’s just a real…” Gallick pauses. “Heart…to it.”
— This story first ran in the Spring 2010 issue of MOTION.
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