Transplant Surgeon Serves a Transcendent God: Robert B. Love, M.D. Named Bethel Alumnus of the Year

by Barbara Wright Carlson and Patty Thomson

Dr. Robert Love, a 1978 graduate of Bethel University, is a professor of surgery and director of one of the world's premier heart/lung transplant programs. He came to the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics-Madison in 1991 to develop its thoracic transplant program. Today, UW has a achieved a 87 percent one-year survival rate and a 65 percent five-year survival rate—the best in the world on both counts according to the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation. Bethel's 2004 Alumnus of the Year, Love has performed or participated in more than 1,000 thoracic organ transplant surgeries.

"I've always been drawn to areas of medicine that are the most difficult and challenging," says Love, the grandson of a doctor and the son of a pastor and a school nurse. "My parents and grandfather encouraged me to serve God through medicine. They viewed it as a calling." Love also worked with Dr. C. Everett Koop just before Koop became U.S. Surgeon General. "That relationship helped crystallize my desire to become an academic surgeon," says Love.

Since graduating from Bethel in 1978 with a degree in chemistry and from Rush Medical College in 1982, Love has risen to the top of a white-knuckle vocation that sometimes requires 100-hour work weeks due to the urgent need to operate whenever organs become available. In 2004 he was in the national media spotlight following a dramatic double-lung transplant on Trey Schwab, popular assistant basketball coach for Marquette University and former talent scout for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Swab, 39, suffered from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare disease that was rapidly destroying his lungs.

"I did a significant amount of research into transplant centers and surgeons," says Schwab. "There was one name that came up time and time again, and that was Dr. Love's. After I had an opportunity to meet him, I knew I had found the right person. He is truly amazing, not just due to his skill as a surgeon, but it is evident to anyone who spends any time around him that he truly puts his heart and soul into everything he does."

Schwab would certainly need this extra measure of dedication. On February 17, Love performed the successful lung transplantation. But on March 1, when Schwab stood up in the intensive care unit (I.C.U.), he collapsed and went into cardiac arrest. He had developed a blood clot in his leg from a rare reaction to his blood thinning medication. The staff attempted resuscitation, and Schwab was rushed into emergency open heart surgery. There, Love and his team removed the U-shaped clot, which had occupied a critical place between Schwab's right and left pulmonary arteries. During the episode, Schwab was clinically dead for 40 interminable minutes.

Love took time to pray and to call his wife, Phoebe, to ask her to pray. "When things are like this," says Love, "I tend to take my patient before the Lord, and have my family do so as well." Phoebe and their daughter, Natalie, immediately went to prayer, as did countless friends and relatives of Trey Schwab's.

"It is important for any physician to keep in perspective that God allows us to participate in His plan for a patient," Love reflected later. "I always try to participate in that transaction to the best of my skill and calling, which is all I can do. Ultimately a patient's healing or death is not confined to the skill or lack of skill of the physician."

In Schwab's case, God's plan was to work a miracle. He survived without brain or other major organ damage, despite minimal oxygen flow throughout his system for an extended time. In an interview with the Associated Press, Schwab said, "Obviously there's something bigger than all of us at work here. It's a shot at a second chance, and you just try to make the most of it." Schwab, who calls Love "the Michael Jordan of transplant surgeons," is back at Marquette part time, supervising team practices—without the oxygen tank he needed before the transplant.

Love credits the Lord for his patient’s recovery. At the news conference before Schwab’s hospital discharge, he said, "I really can’t explain something supernatural like this completely. Despite all the expertise we have, the fact that [Trey] is walking out of here today is, I believe, due to the fact that the Lord honors the gift that the donor family gave—the gift of life that Trey was able to receive."

It’s a message Love takes public as often as he can: Organ donation gives life, but transplant work is greatly hampered by the shortage of available donor organs. Every individual, he says, should sign a donor card and inform family members of his or her desire to be an organ donor.

Colleagues respect Love’s servant heart as much as they do his formidable skills. "Bob has a passion for cardiothoracic surgery, and his devotion for lung transplantation has kept him in the academic setting instead of moving out to what would be a clearly easier and more lucrative private practice," says Dr. Terrence Frick, a colleague of 15 years. "He is a ‘surgeon’s surgeon’ and takes on many tough cases others would not touch. He has faced adversity, long hours, and red tape to forward the lung and heart transplant programs."

Indeed, Love has spent an equal portion of his career training future surgeons on the intricacies of cardiothoracic surgery. For years the Loves lived within walking distance of the hospital in Madison so that he could quickly assist residents and interns in their treatment of a patient in trouble.

When not teaching or in surgery, Love may be found in the lab, supervising research on the biological aspects of transplantation surgery and tissue rejection. He has shared his findings from the lab and O.R. at international presentations in Barcelona, Spain; London; and Vancouver, Canada. He has been a visiting professor at The Groningen Symposium, Groningen Institute in the Netherlands; Gloucester Royal Hospital in Gloucester, UK; and in Newcastle, UK. His publications are in numerous medical journals, including Transplantation, Contemporary Surgery, Surgery, Journal of Hear Lung Transplantation, Clinical Pulmonary Medicine, Human Immunology, Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and Anesthesiology.

Attending him everywhere has been a dry wit and a "winsome way of speaking about his deeply held faith," says Love’s pastor, Rev. Chris Dolson, of Black Hawk Evangelical Free Church, where the Loves are actively involved. Dolson, whose own son had a congenital defect corrected by Love, calls the doctor a "Christ-follower in surgeon’s clothing."

Throughout a demanding career, Love has remained devoted to his family. He and Phoebe Morgan ’78 met at Bethel and have been married for 25 years. They have three children: Andrew, a college student; Natalie, a recent high school graduate; and 15-year-old Nikolas, whom they adopted from Russia.

Early in their marriage, Phoebe suffered for a time with chronic fatigue syndrome, and Love altered his educational schedule to help with family duties and be a support to his wife. Love now serves on a medical advisory board for the syndrome in the state of Wisconsin.

"Phoebe has been my best friend, confidant, and conscience for the past 25 years," says Love. "She has born the brunt of the demands of surgery, suffering through a long illness, raising three children with unique needs, the 100-hour-a-week absences of her husband, constant interruptions, lack of sleep—all with little recognition of her own sacrifice. I could not have done any of this without her."

As he received the 2004 Alumnus of the Year Award in a chapel service at Bethel, Love told current students that to be a witness in a post-modern, post-Christian culture "we must know how to think and not just what to think—something Bethel helped me do." Love challenged students to look for and point unbelievers to "examples of transcendence that support a Christian worldview," such as Schwab’s unlikely recovery. He says the unusual case brought many people into conversation with him about spiritual issues.