Steady hands of healing
In the summer after his freshman year at MIT, Dylan Soukup sat in an operating room in his home state of Arizona watching a days-old infant’s heart stop — and start again.Soukup was shadowing Michael Teodori ’77, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Arizona Medical Center. “Watching him do those surgeries was just beyond incredible,” Soukup says. “These babies are born with these defects in their heart; through no fault of their own, their heart is failing. And being able to step in and confidently say that you can fix this tiny little baby heart — that’s what I want to do.”In 1993, Soukup himself was a hospitalized infant: At five months old, he was diagnosed with a form of cancer called neuroblastoma. “The good thing about neuroblastoma is that at such a young age, it’s one of the most curable cancers,” Soukup says. After two rounds of chemotherapy,...