HJBR Jul/Aug 2019

dialogue 14 JUL / AUG 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of baton rouge   Chief Editor Smith W. Hartley Why did you go into medicine, and why did you choose cardiology? Dr. Craig Walker  Ever since I could remem- ber, I was really amazed by seeing peo- ple improve secondary to medical care. I remember my first earache, and the dra- matic response there was to medication. More important than that, when I was very young, my father was diagnosed with some- thing that I only knew was very bad. There were a lot of tears in our family, and peo- ple thought that nothing could be done for him. He saw a surgeon who treated what turned out later to be a type of cancer that surgery was typically not thought to be able to help, but in his case, it actually cured him. So, my father, who I would have never got- ten to know growing up, lived and was able to seeme finish high school and college and medical school, and almost throughmy fel- lowship. I was amazed early on just seeing how dramatically people could improve from healthcare. I thought that was really quite magical, and then with my father, it was yet more magical because I realized it does a lot more than just treat the patient. It affects everyone around them. I can’t imag- ine what would have happened growing up without the exposure to my father. “But I was lucky enough, purely by chance, to do my cardiology fellowship at one of the first hospitals in America to actually have access to a brand new technology called percutaneous transluminal angioplasty, or treatment of blocked arteries using a balloon. That made me one of the first ten angioplasty fellows in the United States by default.”