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t m c ยป p u l s e | s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 7 32 J oseph Lamelas, M.D., has pioneered an advanced form of minimally invasive cardiac surgery. Born in Cuba and raised in Florida and New York, Lamelas joined Baylor College of Medicine as associate chief of cardiac surgery in the division of cardiothoracic surgery in January. Q | You are known for developing a minimally invasive heart surgery and for teaching hundreds of physicians this new technique. When did you realize a need for this type of surgery? A | At the beginning of 2004, it came to me that I needed to do something to differentiate myself and also to tap into all of the new advances in the field of cardiology. I figured I needed to do surgery a different way. I started work- ing on this new technique, a minimally invasive approach. I went around to see a few people who were doing it at that time and then I evolved the technique. What's nice about it is that it can be applied to all subsets of patients. No matter the risk category or a patient's age, just about everyone is a candidate. It developed to a point that I saw the necessity to create new instruments to be able to do this operation. That led to me going around to all the big companies, but none of them listened, so I developed my own company called Miami Instruments. Q | For you, what is the specific allure of heart surgery? A | My uncle is a physician and I got to go into the operating room early on, and that piqued my interest in surgery. It is one of the few specialties where you actually do something to the patient and you see an immediate result. Cardiac surgery patients are pretty spectacular because they are very sick, you do a big operation on them, and then the next day they are sitting up. Cardiac surgery is also very dynamic. It is a specialty that always has a lot of innovation. When you think about it, the other organs in the body are pretty static. But with the heart, you have to think about it three-dimension- ally. It's not just science, but an art. Q | What do you remember about your early years in Cuba? A | I don't remember any of my time in Cuba; all I know are stories from my parents. I was born in Cuba in 1960. At the beginning of 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis and Fidel Castro taking over, my family fled. My two grand- mothers, my mother, my father, my older brother and I came to Miami, and we had to start from scratch. Q | How did your family get out of Cuba? A | Pan American had planes leaving. I know because when my mother gave me my passport, in the back there were a bunch of papers and there was a Pan Am airline ticket dated January 1963. My father scrambled around to get tickets on the last plane leaving Cuba, but when we got there, the airport was closed. So he gave his home away to a communist couple and they were able to get us tickets on one of three Red Cross boats leaving Cuba that were bringing survivors of the Bay of Pigs back to the U.S. We landed in Ft. Lauderdale and when we got off the boat, there was a band playing to welcome back the soldiers. Q | What was your life like after arriving in the U.S.? A | I remember for Christmas when I was growing up, you could buy pack- ages of little green soldiers. My parents would buy those and divide them up because there was no money. We were living in very rough times, three or four families in one home. Someone picked up a sofa from the street and my grandma knew how to reupholster it. My younger brother slept in a cabinet after he was born because we didn't have enough money to buy a crib. But my father always emphasized that it was important to have an edu- cation. They can take everything away from you, like they did in Cuba, but they can't take your education. So he was instrumental in making sure we all had careers. I grew up in West Palm Beach and New York. We moved up there because at the time, there was more of an opportunity for jobs. We lived there for 14 years and then moved back to West Palm Beach. A Different Approach to the Heart Joseph Lamelas, M.D., is perfecting minimally invasive heart surgery B y B r i t n i N . R i l e y Joseph Lamelas, M.D., with his wife and nurse practitioner, Shay Lamelas, making rounds at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center.