The real beauty of Renee Hartz, her friends and colleagues say, is that she is both a special person and a regular person. No wonder-she has always been too busy to put on airs. Her mother, one of 13 children, raised her brood of seven to be self-reliant and hard-working. Hartz, who started working as a waitress at age 14, says, ”I worked as a waitress during both college and the summer before medical school, and I feel that one reason I can quickly size up patients is the insight I acquired during all the years I spent waiting on people.
During college, when her father was out of work, she used to send her student-loan checks back to Ironwood to help her family. She made up for it by working as a waitress at the nearby Holiday Inn. ”I guess I`ve always been the Santa Claus in my family,” she says. ”My father was a `no-collar` laborer, and the mines in Ironwood were drying up. We were very poor.”
Her fortunes began to change when she became a lab technician at Northwestern. ”I was working with both physicians and patients,” she recalls, ”and I loved it. Within three months I applied for medical school. My roommate was a psychiatric social worker, and she pushed me to apply.”
Hartz was accepted to the Northwestern University Medical School in December, 1969, for admittance the following fall. She hung the acceptance letter on her Christmas tree. ”I had also been accepted at other medical schools,” she says, ”and I almost went to the University of Michigan, but I decided that Chicago was home.” She paid her way through the four years of medical school through a combination of work at the hospital`s lab, student loans, a small scholarship and money she had saved from waitress work.
In 1972 she married Wilson Hartz III, a medical student at Northwestern who is now a general surgeon practicing at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and whose father is also a Northwestern physician. The couple divorced in 1986 and now alternate custody of their two children-Tyler, 10, and Colin, 6. In 1974 Hartz acquired her M.D. degree and promptly began a seven-year surgical residency.
”Medical school was pure drudgery during the first two years,” she recalls, ”but the minute I hit the patient wards during my junior year, I was in heaven. It was obvious that I was a doer. I wanted to do the spinal taps and the suturing myself, and I was a very aggressive student. I actually got to do surgery as a medical student. My first operation was modest-a circumcision on a 40-year-old man-but I loved it. The next week, I did a hernia, which qualified as a real operation. I loved everything during my clinical rotations except psychiatry-you don`t ”do” anything-and gynecology- it just wasn`t appealing to me. But my true love was heart surgery.
She now does about 200 open-heart procedures a year, as well as other operations. She works about 70 hours a week and is paid ”barely six figures”-about a fourth of what she could make in private practice doing less-complicated heart surgery. She says the money is not that important.
”I keep a doll on my bedroom dresser at home,” she says. ”It is one of the few mementoes I have from my life in Ironwood, but I keep it to remind me from where I came.”
Hartz lives on the city`s Near Northwest Side in a three-story, four-bedroom stucco house built in the Old Chicago style of 1907. She gutted the kitchen and rehabbed it with enough modern cabinets and appliances to enable her to throw gourmet dinner parties when she can find the time. She remodeled her old master bathroom into a modern showplace gleaming with white tile and a two-pedestal sink. Another indulgence is a big brass bed in the master bedroom.
She turned the large basement into a recreation room for her sons, featuring a 7-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, nets for floor hockey and a 25- inch television (one of four in the house) set up for video games. Her children are firmly fixed in the computer generation, and Tyler has his own Apple IIGS student computer for education and graphics, while Mom uses a Zenith laptop model.
The home is cheerful and neat throughout, except for the mess in the basement, which she explains as ”toys, toys, toys.” The downstairs living room features a stereo and large speakers for Hartz`s favorite music: oldies from the `60s and heavy rock.
Her key to being a single mother, she says, ”is my live-in housekeeper, Julia Casas, who`s been with me for 10 years. She`s always with the kids, living either at my house or my ex-husband`s, who lives nearby. She`s the continuity, and I trust her with the kids.” Hartz still talks to her ex-husband almost every day and says the two are very proud of their
cooperation in raising their sons. ”I married the wrong man for me,” she says, ”but, in many ways, we`re better friends now than when we married.”
She likes to bowl with her sons, go to movies (”we see everything”), and read children`s stories to Colin. Tyler, she says, ”is a readaholic, when he`s not playing games.” She adds: ”Sure, I spoil my kids-that`s life-but I made a very calculated decision to raise my sons as city kids, not suburban kids. I have them play hockey at the McFetridge Center with the sons of working-class policemen and truck drivers and not at some swank suburban rink. I send them to private schools because I think that education is very important, but I want them to know the real world, too.”
As a medical student and resident, Hartz had no female role models, but today she is a role model for medical students and residents of both sexes. Her training at Northwestern coincided with the golden era of improvements in heart surgery. Dr. Lawrence Michaelis, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Northwestern University Medical School, says, ”When Renee achieved certification by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, she was only the 13th woman in the entire country to achieve this distinction.”
There are 4,500 board-certified cardiothoracic surgeons in the U.S., and only 43 are women. Hartz says: ”My proudest accomplishment to date is that I am an associate professor of heart surgery-with tenure-at the Northwestern University Medical School. This means that I do research and teaching, as well as surgery. It means that I am an academic surgeon, part of a great university team. In five to seven years, I`ll fulfill the requirements to become a full professor. The real reason I stay at Northwestern is that because of our technology and our team approach we can offer patients the best heart surgery possible. What I need to do for a patient is always possible, and, somehow, we always seem to get it done.”
Now firmly established ”as one of the boys,” Hartz says she had to surmount subtle sexism during her training. ”There was an attitude,” she recalls, ”as if nobody expected me to be good. It was never overt, and it was never sexual-I would never put myself in a position where I would be subject to sexual harassment-but there was a bias. In 1978, when I returned to my residency after having my first baby, I temporarily felt very depressed and very pressured. I started to blame myself, as if I were not good enough. But I realized that no one is perfect, and I made myself talk to the people who I thought were being unfair. In hindsight I can see that during all my rotations through the different medical specialties, I would be a wreck for the first week because I did not feel in control of this new field. But it passed as soon as I took control. It took me a while to convince myself that I really was a very good surgeon, but once I did, I never looked back. And, of course, toward the end of my residency, the other surgeons accepted me as a peer, and the sexism evaporated. Oh, one old doctor insisted on calling me `honey,` but he calls everybody `honey.`
Colleague John Sanders, a superb heart surgeon and one blessed with unfailing amiability under pressure, says, ”Renee will do me if I ever need heart surgery. She`s that good.” Similarly, Dr. Jay Alexander, the cardiologist who successfully treated Mike Ditka with drugs, observes, ”I refer a lot of surgical patients to Northwestern and Renee, and it`s highly possible that if Ditka had required surgery, Renee would have done it. Certainly, she can do me if my turn ever comes. She projects a real air of confidence.”
Dr. Pat Pappas, a seventh-year surgical resident at Children`s Hospital, is also a former Northwestern Outstanding Surgical Resident of the Year and knows well the pressures of surgical training. ”Renee has always been a role model for me. She`s unique. First, she`s a woman heart surgeon, and there aren`t too many of these; second, she`s an outstanding heart surgeon who is technically gifted and has real compassion for her patients, and there aren`t too many of these, either; third, she is a terrific mother for her two sons and manages to balance a heavy surgical schedule with being a single mother, and I really respect that; and, fourth, she`s simply a good person.”
Cardiac anesthesiologist Dr. Carolyn Brent, who is married to longtime Michigan Avenue bookseller Stuart Brent, adds: ”I`ve known Renee since she was a `little girl,` and it`s been exciting to see her blossom into an outstanding surgeon.” Another cardiac anesthesiologist, Dr. Peter Lichtenthal, who has worked hundreds of cases in Hartz`s OR, adds: ”We regulars sometimes call her `Stella` from the play `A Streetcar Named Desire.` You know, she`s our Polish Queen. In the OR, she`s just one of the guys, so to speak, and the atmosphere is always very relaxed.”
Deaths from heart and blood-vessel disease have dropped 24 percent over the last decade, but it remains the nation`s biggest killer, taking a life every 32 seconds, according to the American Heart Association. The decline in death rates is attributed to a combination of healthier living habits and improved medical treatments.
Dr. Sanders puts things in perspective. ”When I started my training back in the 1960s, heart surgery carried a 30- to 50-percent mortality rate-and that included all the otherwise-healthy middle-aged people who came in for elective procedures. Thanks to improvements in imaging the heart muscle and vessels, in surgical techniques and in methods to protect the heart during surgery, we`ve been able to reduce our overall mortality to 4 to 6 percent, and this includes taking all comers who walk in the door, including patients who are very old and very sick and have multiple ailments. The mortality rate for middle-aged men and women who have elective surgery is only a fraction of 1 percent.” As for the future, Dr. Michaelis predicts, ”The era of the brilliant, charismatic, maverick surgeon is over. He-and they all were male- is being replaced by the team philosophy, though the surgeon will always be the quarterback. . . .”
Hartz thinks her research may help redefine how heart surgery is practiced in the future. Her work on cold lasers, which do not generate as much destructive heat as the normal variety, may eventually help unclog arteries without the need for opening the chest and without causing the long- term development of dangerous arterial swellings, or aneurysms, as do the
”hot” lasers.
She has also helped pioneer the surgical implantation of the automatic implantable cardiac defibrillator to prevent a fast irregular beating of the heart, called arrhythmia, and sudden cardiac death.
The first page of the Northwestern house staff manual for cardiothoracic surgery notes, ”These guidelines are not laws. . . . There is no substitute for common sense.” All who know her say Hartz is blessed with abundant common sense, fortified by extensive experience. There are no jokes about female hormones and ”estrogen storms” when this woman takes command of the OR. And, most mornings, when her bathroom alarm clock rings at 6 a.m., she is off for the OR. ”I`m unlike most surgeons in that I hate early morning,” she says. ”That`s why I keep the alarm in the bathroom-if I had it next to the bed, I`d be tempted to shut it off. Once I`m up, though, I`m ready to go full speed.”
For which many Chicago patients are grateful-prominent attorney Thomas Foran, for example. Foran, 65, was a Navy fighter pilot during World War II, a football player at Holy Cross, a former U.S. Attorney for Illinois who helped try the Chicago Seven and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Illinois in 1972. Now he`s a big-income criminal-trial attorney, with opulent offices in the Loop and a large home in Lake Forest. Three years ago, while performing a cross-examination, he had a massive heart attack and,
fortuitously, crossed paths with Hartz.
”I thought I was a goner,” Foran says. ”You know the feeling you got in the pit of your stomach when you were a kid and somebody jumped out from behind a door and scared you-well, that`s how I felt. The pain was murderous, and it felt as if an elephant were sitting on my chest. My arms went numb, and I was almost in too much pain to talk, which is cruel and unusual punishment for an attorney. Well, the ambulance rushed me to the Northwestern emergency room, and Dr. (Barry) Kramer performed angioplasty, which relieved the pain a little. But I demanded to see a priest. I thought that I was going to meet my maker. Then I sort of passed out, and the next thing I recall I was looking up at this knockout babe-Renee Hartz. I thought that I`d gone to heaven. She said, `I`m Renee Hartz, and I`m going to be your surgeon.` I`m a real male chauvinist pig, and I asked, `Are you any good?`
She said, `I`m the best`-and I believed it. I`m used to bossing people around myself, and I could tell that she had the respect of everyone around her. She`s not only a beautiful woman, she looks intelligent, and she has strong, capable hands. I said, `Well, then, hurry up. I have a cross-examination to finish.` She told me, `You`re going to be all right-you sound like a keeper.` ”
(Hartz explains, ”It`s not so much that I think I am the best surgeon as it is that I say this when I can tell the patient needs to hear it. . . . And I know that I am a very good surgeon, and I`ve earned the right to say so.”) Foran had what surgeons call a ”widowmaker,” a total blockage of the left main coronary artery. Hartz and her team repaired it and two other diseased arteries. Within eight days, Foran was out of the hospital. That fall he tried a major criminal case in Miami. Today he feels better than ever. He says, ”This woman is special. She`s not just a doctor; she`s a physician. . . . Whatever honor I can give this woman, I will. I owe her.”
Hartz recalls only one time when she lost her composure in the OR-the time her mother came to Northwestern for bypass of five diseased arteries. She explains, ”Doctors Michaelis and Sanders were doing my mother`s surgery, but a case came up in the other OR, and the surgeon needed an assistant. I scrubbed and jumped in to help, because I didn`t want anyone diverted from my mother`s case. Well, I just couldn`t do it. I was worrying about my mother, and I lost it. My hands actually began to shake-which is something that never happens. I left the OR and went back to where I belonged-the waiting room!” Rita Semo sailed through just dandy.
Her parents are enormously proud of her, Hartz says, ”but they really cannot relate to my life as a surgeon in a big- city medical center. The one who understands is my older sister, Rita.” Hartz`s two brothers are carpenters, another sister is an ex-nun and recent new wife and mother living in Aurora, and the two younger sisters still live in Ironwood.
Rita Semo Wickham, 44, is also an achiever. She married a serviceman at age 17 and settled down in Aurora, where she and her husband have raised four children. Along the way, she acquired her high school diploma by mail and earned bachelor and master`s degrees in nursing. Today she is an academic nurse at Chicago`s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center, both caring for cancer patients and pursuing her Ph.D. in nursing. She travels about the country lecturing on modern nursing care. She says, ”What impresses me most about Renee is the way she makes time for her kids. She juggles her schedule so she almost always makes her kids` hockey games and school plays. When she`s not in surgery, she`s with them.”
On a recent night at a lounge near the hospital, Hartz gathers with her sister, Rita, her two closest friends, Camille Tracer of Chicago and Debbie Johnson of Wilmette, and former patient Foran. The talk soon turns from surgery to fashions and men. Hartz, a flashy dresser-but a bargain shopper- has, postdivorce, dated mostly doctors, including artificial-heart inventor Dr. Robert Jarvik, but she also has dated and been linked in the gossip columns with Bears` quarterback Mike Tomczak. ”He`s just a good friend,” she says.
”At this point in my life, my children and my surgery take up most of my time, but I hope to find the right man and marry again. My social life is very important to me, but I don`t have time to just date around.”
The three friends are planning to open a Chicago clothing store, specializing in leisure and sports clothes for women, perhaps to be called Hartz` Desire. Hartz, dressed this evening in hot pink (”my favorite color”) slacks and turtleneck, set off by silver tennis shoes and a bulky white sweater appliqued with fuchsia flowers, looks the part. She works out in a
”no-nonsense” gym to stay in shape.
Tracer, who is married to a psychiatrist, interrupts, ”I am very happy that Renee is part of my life,” she says, ”but it is hard to be her friend. That`s because she`s a perfectionist, and she does everything well. I mean, she`s beautiful, a terrific skier, a gourmet cook, a champion windsurfer and a supernice friend. But what amazes me is what a regular person she is. We met because our children both attended the same Chicago school. The first time I called her on the phone, she was retiling her bathroom floor. I thought,
`Here`s this hotshot surgeon, and she`s busy retiling her bathroom!` At parties, she used to say only, `I work in a hospital.` Eventually she worked herself up to admitting, `I`m a physician.` Now she says, `I`m a heart surgeon.`
”And she used to get up at 3 a.m. to drive to Oshkosh, Wis., to be first in line for the 7 a.m. opening of a factory outlet selling children`s designer clothes at bargain prices! I think that what she really wants is a bright, accomplished man, but one with dirt under his fingernails, a little bit of grit. A lot of men are intimidated by the mystique of her being a surgeon, but Renee is really a regular person with the down-to-earth values typical of someone raised in a lower middle-class family. One local real estate mogul sent his chauffeured Rolls-Royce to pick her up for a date. She was appalled; she`d rather be out bowling!”
”Sometimes I think that men want to go out with me because of the status image of dating a surgeon,” Hartz says. ”That turns me off. I want a man who is accomplished in his own work and who is secure. And he must be ambitious. I cannot stand a man who because he is excessively good-looking thinks that he can be lazy about his personality. And he must make me laugh!”
Hartz explains: ”There are sacrifices you have to make to do what I do. Sometimes I would like to chop my hair short, dye it a different color and stay up all night dancing. I have the energy to do it, but I won`d do anything that reflects poorly upon my credibility as a physician.”
Debbie Johnson, who is divorced from a surgeon who trained at the same time Hartz did, has the last word. ”Renee has a wonderful heart,” she says. ”I have tons and tons of memories about our times together. She`s a doctor, but when her own kids get sick she almost gets hysterical and gets on the phone asking me for advice. When she was pregnant with Tyler, she became convinced that she had miscarried, which was silly. She was doing surgery right up until she delivered. One of our good friends is a nurse who used to ride to the hospital with Renee. During the drive, she told me, the talk was all girl stuff. The minute Renee walked in the door, however, a gleam came to her eye and she became a general, ready for battle.
”The two of us and Renee`s two children recently vacationed at a Club Med in Mexico. She enjoys me because I am fun. The men were all over her, using the usual lines and asking, `What do you do?` When she explained that she was a heart surgeon, they looked doubtful-for about five seconds. I mean, she can have it all. Here`s this terrific heart surgeon walking in a bikini along the beach with her two sons and turning heads. And she`s my best friend. It`s enough to warm your heart.” –
