Sitting in an armchair in the living room of his Oak Brook home on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Gerard Aranha recalled his first television appearance, which took place during last year’s gubernatorial race.
Aranha, director of Loyola’s Breast Care Center, was asked to comment on whether chemotherapy and radiation treatments could weaken the Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor, Penny Severns, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. His response was that a lot depends on the strength of the individual patient.
TV appearances are no longer a novelty for Aranha.
He headed a team of 12 others–five surgical oncologists, two urologists, two anesthesiologists and three nurses–in the 7-hour, 20-minute operation on Cardinal Joseph Bernardin for pancreatic cancer in June.
While operating on the leader of the Archdiocese of Chicago catapulted the Indian-born doctor into the media spotlight, Aranha prefers to treat his patients away from the public eye. Also chief of surgical oncology at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, where he performs eight to 14 operations a week.
But he couldn’t escape the press when Bernardin checked into the hospital the day before his surgery.
That night Aranha spoke at a press conference for the first time. A second press conference was held the next day, after the surgery, and a third ensued when pathology test results had been received. Meanwhile, reporters contacted Aranha daily for updates on the 67-year-old prelate’s condition.
“The art of being a physician is a private communication between a doctor and his patient,” Aranha said. “However, I realize there are some people who have public and private lives. And because of the cardinal’s public life, I went along with the TV interviews and press conferences. felt that since he was a public person, he had no choice but to have his illness announced rather than leave it to rumor and speculation.”
The cardinal’s choice
Aranha is highly skilled in the Whipple procedure that he performed on Bernardin, in which parts of the cardinal’s stomach, pancreas, small intestine, bile duct and gallbladder and nearby lymph nodes were removed and the remaining parts were sewn together. While most surgeons do only one to two Whipple procedures a year, Aranha averages between 8 and 10.
It was this expertise that led Bernardin to select him as chief surgeon, with the advice of his personal physician, Dr. Warren W. Furey, chairman of the department of medicine at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago. Furey and Dr. William C. Allen, chairman of the hospital’s department of surgery, consulted with a pancreatic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and doctors at Loyola before making a final decision.
“We are very pleased with the results,” Furey said, referring to the cardinal’s release from Loyola a week after surgery; most patients who undergo the Whipple procedure remain hospitalized from 10 to 14 days.
The day before Bernardin went home, Aranha attended mass in a hospital room adjacent to the one in which the cardinal was staying.
Aranha returned home with a St. Christopher medal–a token identical to those Bernardin also gave to Furey and Dr. Robert Flanigan, professor and chairman of Loyola’s urology department, who removed the cardinal’s right kidney, which turned out to have a rare benign tumor.
The medal lay in its red case on a coffee table next to the chair in which Aranha sat cross-legged, dressed in the gray wool suit, white dress shirt and silk patterned tie that he had donned for mass. On the left lapel of his suit was a pin with the emblem of the American Cancer Society.
“For me, medicine is just the opportunity to help those who are sick,” said the 51-year-old surgeon. “I always feel that money will come and should not be the primary goal.”
A lifelong dream
He knew he wanted to be a surgeon when he was 6. His ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, the highest ranking public health official in Bangalore–the southern Indian city of Aranha’s birth–and his uncle, a cardiovascular thoracic surgeon who was dean of St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore.
He was educated in Jesuit schools, and though his parents wanted him to pursue an accountancy degree in London, Aranha entered Bangalore Medical College in 1962. After graduating in 1967, he interned at a local hospital and lectured in physiology at St. John’s Medical College. In January 1970, he journeyed to the United States with his wife, Rosemary, a native of Madras.
A few days after their arrival, he took up a residency in general surgery at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, continuing at Hines Medical Center in Maywood and Loyola University Medical Center. He then took a two-year fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Minnesota.
“My aim was to train in America and take the expertise that I learned over here back to India,” Aranha said.
Upon completion of his training in 1977, he received a joint appointment as chief of the general surgery and surgical oncology sections at Hines and assistant professor of surgery at Loyola.
In December of that year, he returned to India, where he declined job offers from two hospitals because the opportunities for teaching and conducting research on cancer were not available. At the time, the Indian government was pouring its funds into combating malnutrition, poor hygiene and a high infant mortality rate, all of which kept life expectancy then around 50.
“Maybe if I had given it some time, it may have worked out,” Aranha said.
When asked if he regrets returning to and staying in the U.S., he replied, “I have a comfortable life, good friends, my wife and children are happy. But behind it all, every now and then, I have the feeling that if I went back, I would have been a great use to that country.”
Working as many as 70 hours a week, Aranha still finds time for his family. He has five American-born children with Rosemary, a social worker for the Melrose Park School District: Caroline, 24, has a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Loyola; Shawn, 23, received bachelor’s degrees from Loyola in psychology and political science and plans to enter law school in 1996; Robert, 22, is a senior economics and biology major at Pennsylvania State University; Matthew, 19, studies business science as a junior at the University of Notre Dame; and 6-year-old Elizabeth.
The family lives in a two-story white brick house with a circle drive and a 3-year-old female Bichon Frise named Lucky. It’s there Aranha unwinds at the end of the day.
“He’s never told us how a surgery has gone. He never brings his work home,” said Robert, who is living at home during the summer.
Keeping fit
Though Aranha reads surgical journals a few nights a week, he makes certain to work out every day. He does 25 minutes of Richard Simmons’ aerobic exercises that he memorized from a book, followed by 20 minutes of pedaling on an exercise bicycle. He has kept at this for the past 12 years.
These days he manages to squeeze in a 45-minute piano lesson on Monday nights. He and Rosemary drive to Hendricks Pianos in Downers Grove for a joint session in folk and classical music.
“It helps me keep the fingers flexible,” Aranha explained. “It’s an important thing you need in surgery.”
“For him, it’s therapy to come home and resume some normal life,” said Rosemary, a trim woman with chin-length black hair. But, she continued, “if his patient requires for him to be there , he has to go. That’s his priority–serving the patient.”
Aranha has had to make compromises in balancing career and family.
Always an admirer of doctors such as Albert Schweitzer who helped people in undeveloped parts of the world, Aranha is considering philanthropic work after his retirement. He might volunteer for Americares, the Connecticut-based non-profit foundation that sends medicines, medical supplies and personnel on one-week to three-month stints throughout the world to train local health professionals and develop new programs.
From 1979 to 1988, he served the Visitation Church in Elmhurst as lector, usher and Eucharistic minister for three years each.
“Dr. Aranha is honest, straightforward, pleasant, easy to talk with. He does not talk down to people but talks with them,” said Dr. Herbert Greenlee, professor emeritus of surgery at Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine, who was chief of the surgical service at Hines during part of Aranha’s residency there.
Medical students and residents also consider Aranha an “approachable figure,” said Dr. Peter Rantis, who assisted Aranha in Bernardin’s operation before completing his residency at Loyola in June. “He’s definitely one of the favorites. He cares about our lives outside the hospital.”
Aranha’s children are proud of their father’s accomplishments. Robert and Shawn took turns taping his appearances on the local TV news.
“We continually tape whatever we can–first of all, for our family to remember the significant event in all our lives, and secondly, to share this event with our relatives who cannot join us,” Shawn said.
Aranha said he will copy all the segments onto one videocassette tape and send it to his parents, who will pass it along to relatives in India.
As for the medal, the cardinal’s gift, he said: “I will display it prominently in the house.”
