Love of medicine takes Frist to gorilla’s operating table
WASHINGTON – The houses were dark on Bill Frist’s street. A morning bird chirped; the others were waiting for dawn. But Frist was awake, and his bedroom light was on.
In the kitchen, Frist’s wife, Karyn, was brewing coffee and remembering their life before politics. For 20 years, Frist had worked as a heart transplant surgeon. He had stitched hearts into more than 150 lives.
Frist, at heart, is a doctor. At 5:45 a.m., before a recent Senate workday, he prepared for a quirky slice of surgery. During congressional breaks, Frist, 54, has been known to fly to Africa to operate. But in Washington, he has quietly cultivated another practice: gorillas at the National Zoo.
“These gorillas seem to develop heart disease,” said Frist, R-Tenn. “It’s totally unknown. I did a lit search – nothing. The fact that we’re working on the edge of the unknown is fun.”
Frist, in a gray suit, picked up his file marked “ZOO” and said, “We’ve got to be on time to open the Senate.”
He climbed into the back of his black SUV; his driver steered toward the zoo. “I gravitate towards insurmountable problems,” Frist said, his long legs spilling between the front seats. “I try to use creative solutions.” One day, he hopes to cure AIDS or cancer. He sucked on the stem of his glasses: “The typical person around here may not understand.”
At the zoo hospital, a team of four veterinarians, three technicians, an animal keeper and a veterinary dentist were wheeling a 350-pound gorilla into surgery as Frist arrived. They would perform an ultrasound of the heart, a root canal and a physical. Frist joined the team, as he had on other mornings, tying on a mask. He unbuttoned his business shirt, revealing jungle-pattern surgical scrubs and a pair of hairy, toned biceps.
“A little bit like Superman,” said the dentist, Chuck Williams.
Frist snapped on rubber gloves. He leaned over the operating table, gripping the corners. An oxygen monitor beeped. The patient gagged.
“This is home,” Frist said through his mask. “Where I spent 12 hours a day for 20 years.”
He pressed his stethoscope to the gorilla’s chest and narrowed his eyes. Kuja, a silverback patriarch, was breathing isofluorine. He was the Senate majority leader of the gorillas, who negotiated disputes, back-slapped the ape boys and owned exclusive mating rights with the females. When Kuja started to stir, a veterinarian injected more anesthesia. One backhanded swipe could break Frist’s neck.
Frist listened to the heart; the gorilla’s lub-dub sounded human. “When you’re this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them,” Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes.
A veterinarian rotated the ultrasound probe over Kuja’s heart. The dentist tweezed out the bloody string of a root canal – “Isn’t this exciting?” – and Frist slipped an IV needle into Kuja’s vein. His gloves turned red with gorilla blood.
“There’s almost a spiritual, poetic component to it,” Frist said, his eyes expressing what his surgical mask hid. “This oneness, this wholeness. You can’t compare it to the Senate floor. I immerse myself in it. This is my real life.”
Frist lifted Kuja’s huge, leathery black hand. Williams, the dentist, said, “Take him with you to the Senate, so when Biden or Kennedy mouth off, you can turn him loose.”
“He’s on my side,” Frist said, stroking Kuja’s fur.
Afterward, Frist buttoned himself back up, into his blue shirt and into his senatorial reserve. “I need to be talking to the Israeli prime minister in 18 minutes,” he told his driver as the SUV rumbled toward the Capitol.
At 9:30 a.m., Frist opened the Senate, gripping the corners of the lectern, as he had the operating table. Across the city, rolling in a bed of hay, Kuja opened his eyes and grunted. The gorilla kept touching his tongue to his tooth. Something had changed inside of the beast while he slept. Frist smiled and spoke unremarkably from the lectern, reeking of silverback testosterone.