Maggie McKay (Host): Hopefully, you'll never need a cardiothoracic surgeon. But if you do, you want to make sure you feel comfortable with your choice. Let's meet Dr. Steven Marra, cardiothoracic surgeon at Beebe Healthcare to talk about what it's like to treat crucial conditions in the heart, lungs and chest at Beebe, and what he does when he is not saving lives.

Host: Welcome to Beebe Healthcare podcast. I'm Maggie McKay. Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Marra. I can't wait to get to know you a little more and hear what you do at Bebe. Would you please introduce yourself?

Steven Marra, MD: Yes. My name is Steven Marra. I'm currently a cardiothoracic surgeon at Beebe Healthcare, located in Lewes, Delaware, situated right next to Rehoboth Beach.

Host: Nice. And so in the beginning, how did you choose cardiothoracic surgery?

Steven Marra, MD: Ever since I was a young child, I've always been interested in the sciences, all kinds of sciences basically. My father, when he got out of the Air Force, which he was stationed in Dayton, Ohio, became a hospital administrator at the children's hospital there. So, I spent a lot of my weekends going into the hospital with my father and rounding and things like that. And he always respected the physicians and worked well with the physicians. And I grew up in a small town just south of Dayton, Ohio, called Oakwood, and the privilege of a number of friends of mine, their fathers were physicians. So, it was something that's always been around my life socially with my father's job as a hospital administrator and being around them professionally. It was a profession that I grew to understand was a respected profession and also carried with it a lot of responsibility. And since I had an interest in the sciences, it was kind of a natural marriage for me, I guess, is what you would say.

Host: And do you thrive on excitement and adrenaline-fueled situations? Because I would imagine, it could get pretty hairy in there surgery-wise.

Steven Marra, MD: Yeah. I think, you know, ever since I was a young child, I participated in all aspects of athletics, more partial to football, but baseball and basketball and competitive in that aspect. I think that the desire to achieve a high level of expertise in whatever your chosen profession is, I think that's how I would word it more than saying you're prone to want to be in those situations that are stressful. I mean, you know, those situations I respond to and I think other physicians that are in those stressful situations, whether it's a code or whether it's EMS in the field, it's something we do well with. To say that we seek that, I'm not quite so sure because you always like the time afterwards. Hopefully, it's successful and you did your job well. And certainly, I would not say that individuals in that type of profession shy away from it. I've heard expressions before, you tend to run towards the danger and not away from the danger and those types of things. I think if you're well trained and you're surrounded by a good group of individuals and you feel that in those situations you can perform well, there's a tendency to run towards those circumstances where you can help people and where what you have to offer benefits both the community, individuals and society as a whole.

But again, nobody does it alone. And I think that, for heart surgery, it's a lifetime spent training, educating yourself all along the way, continuous education, being able to choose those around you that are highly skilled in performing their tasks from administrators to the nurses that you work with, to the technicians, so all aspects of people that work in the hospital setting to make your job and your role successful, all the way from the housekeepers who make sure that the rooms are cleaned and patients are moved from different status through the hospital efficiently. It's really quite an involved network of care providers and I do include everyone in that spectrum that's participating in the care of the patient. So, I know that was a long answer to the question, but it really encompasses everything, I think.

Host: I love that you include everybody, like you said, from the house cleaners or the people who keep everything clean for them to move room to room, or the people who take care of all the instruments. Like you said, it just takes a huge team. So, what drew you to Beebe, Dr. Marra? What makes it special?

Steven Marra, MD: What drew me to Beebe, actually, I received a phone call from another fellow heart surgeon, was a very dear friend of mine who knew of a position that was at Beebe currently in cardiac surgery. He called me, and said that he thought it might be a great opportunity to get closer down south. My family's down in South Carolina. It's on the beach. It's a beautiful community, it's a tight-knit community. The hospital is well established. It's a growing healthcare system. And as I took a closer look at it and I met the physicians, met my partner, Dr. Stephenson, Dr. Ray Kuretu is a CT surgeon here, has been here for a number of years, as well as Dr. Stephenson and several of the cardiologists and the administrators, it became obvious to me that was a good fit and it was a nice fit.

Host: How do you deal with the stress of such a life or death career day to day? What keeps you going? Like when you've had a bad day at the hospital, how do you de-stress?

Steven Marra, MD: It's relationships. No man's an island unto himself. I think that throughout the years, you develop both professional relationships, your family grows with you, matures with you. I'm very blessed to have a wonderful family. It's also your team too. So, the entire team goes through good situations, the unpleasant situations. And I think that people have different ways of de-stressing and unwinding and you can go ahead and talk about the Meyers-Briggs personality score and those things. And some people choose to isolate and read a book, and some people choose to de-stress by becoming more engaged and involved in social functions and that kind of thing.

I kind of have a mix. The work week depends on how tired I am. I do enjoy sports. I'm a big Eagles fan. My son graduated from University of South Carolina. I'm a Gamecock fan. I work out, lifting weights and on the treadmill. I do quite a bit of reading. I like educational reading. I also like rereading classics. And of course, being down here, I mean, if you're somebody that doesn't like the beach and you like more of a big city, Chicago, New York feel, you might feel a little isolated down here. But I enjoy the beach, and I really enjoy all that that goes along with the beach life. And I'm enjoying the water and those types of things. I've always enjoyed fishing, So, I'm getting better at cooking fish. You know, it was never one of my strong points,

Host: So funny. Was there a doctor in your life that inspired your interest in medicine or an event that made you decide on what you do?

Steven Marra, MD: I'd have to say several. One of my best friend's father was a general surgeon, growing up in Dayton, Ohio. And he was a very respected general surgeon. There was another cardiothoracic surgeon that actually started the program down at Miami Valley Hospital. That's now a huge system down there. And growing up with their children, and they were very committed family men as well, I got a real understanding of what it meant to not only the individual, what it meant to their families, and then how impactful their roles in the community were. So, I was blessed to be able to not only have my father, you know, my mother was incredibly supportive of both my athletic choices and my professional choices and education, but also have friends that their families had similar value systems. And several of my friends, their parents were lawyers as well. So, I was very blessed to be brought up in that type of a community. But the surgeons, and particularly the cardiac surgeon, there would be parties or things like that, and I would kind of find my way into that area of the house where he was, in his very big office, I would call it more of a library. And I would sit and just talk to him and I was 14, 15 at the time. And he always kind of works where he is in, I want to be him. I want to be that guy.

Host: Did you ever tell him that? Did he have a chance to see you become a doctor?

Steven Marra, MD: Yes. He's long since passed. His daughter went on to nursing school. That's a whole 'nother different discussion about the other aspects of those individuals that I grew up with. But yes, he did.

Host: Dr. Marra, what was your very first job, like say in high school? And what did it teach you?

Steven Marra, MD: Well, it's interesting. My first job, consistent job, was I painted houses with a bunch of teachers who were ex-pro football players. So, they recruited a couple of us from the football team to join their painting crew because then teachers, they had the summers off. So, I really realized the value of hard work because if you paint houses, you're up at the crack of dawn, you're climbing up on the walk boards, you're washing the houses, you're scraping them. And then, you're painting them in the heat of July and August. And the individuals I worked with were ex-football players. So, one of them was about 6' 6'', I'd say he's probably about 310, but he was in great shape. But you'd be up on a walk board three stories up, you know, and I was not small at that time either. I was probably 6'2'', 210 pounds, 220 pounds as a freshman, eighth grade and high school. Those are some big guys up there, three stories up on a walk board. And you're sweating and, it's just a lot of work and you usually work six days out of seven. That was my first job. Great group of guys, learned a lot about life, had a lot in common with them because they were our football coaches and it's a good experience. A lot of work though. I mean, I literally worked very hard.

And then early on, I started volunteering at the hospital. If you wanted to get into medical school back then, it's incredibly competitive, so you had to have a lot of stuff on your application that really kind of made people think that it's what you really wanted to do. So, I volunteered not only at the children's hospital, but at Miami Valley Hospital as well when I was growing up. Doing what all the volunteers used to do, changing bed pans, changing the linens, helping out with, you know, whether it was delivering the food or cleaning. And that gave me a real appreciation of working in the hospitals, not as a heart surgeon, but as a volunteer that went and did anything we could to help with the patients.

Host: My best friend and I did that too in high school and we learned a lot. I think that is a really valuable experience for a young person, to just see what goes on in a hospital, not necessarily the suffering, but it really makes you appreciate your health and what the doctors do, what the nurses do. I think it's really a valuable volunteer job. So, is there one patient in your career that you will always remember and for what reason?

Steven Marra, MD: Yes. There's many. And I guess some of them are still alive, so I can't really go into too much detail depending on the podcast because some of them are pretty particular. I think a lot of the ones that stand in my mind is, you know, the children that I've operated on, many of them traumas, one or two that really stand out. You know, eight hours after being in an operating room and you still get cards from them every year and things like that.

One particular woman in Virginia, she would probably call me once every two months just to talk and find out how my kids were doing, how she was doing. She was very big into bluegrass. And I won't tell you her name, but she and her husband throughout West Virginia, Virginia were pretty instrumental in that whole bluegrass movement back in the '60s and the '70s. And I operated on her and she's a lovely woman. And yeah, it's just a nice relationship, but she has since passed. But again, I'd have to say that the most impactful ones were the children.

Host: I bet. I just love that, that they keep in contact with you and remember what you did for them, probably saving their lives, a lot of them. What would you be if you weren't a surgeon? If you weren't in the medical field, what other job outside of medicine, what would you be?

Steven Marra, MD: Easily, I'd be a football coach. In college, I volunteered and would coach football. When my son was playing, I volunteered and coached JV Football and varsity football. When I went to the program up in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, it was a larger program. There were three heart hospitals at that time. And then, we got down to two hospitals. But to stay engaged, I was asked to participate in calling Pop Warner football games and I just really enjoyed it. By a time during the week, I would go out on the practice fields where the teams are playing. And then, on the weekends, I would be the announcer for the games and just really enjoyed it. I'd announced their names. I started a volunteer thing where if the families donated a dollar to the athletic associations for the given schools, I would do what's called shout outs. So, it would be somebody's birthdays and the raffles that they would do. And it was a college game, so I would call the formations, I would call the individual numbers and all those kinds of things. You know, my son's in his 20s now. I do miss that.

And, again, that would be my dream job. I mean, youth athletics really teaches those individuals a lot about self-respect, respecting others, fair play, the value of relationships, developing strong relationships, identifying your own strengths and weaknesses. If you're forming a team, whether it's an operating room team or a football team or a soccer team, if you're in a leadership role, you have the ability to identify other people's strengths and weaknesses. And it's really the coach's job or the surgeon's job or the leader's job to put people in positions where they're going to be successful. You know, not everybody shows up for work really knowing what they're good at and what they're not good at. But the key to a good, strong leader is he can set up the people that he has working with them and put them in a position to really benefit everybody at the end of the day.

Host: Agreed. Who keeps you grounded?

Steven Marra, MD: My family. And also, over the years, I've developed close relationships with other physicians and friends. And when you're blessed to have the relationships with individuals, that they're able to basically tell you when you think you need to do a better job or call you when they think that you haven't been recognized for doing something. And I think your family, if you're blessed to have a close family and children, they keep you very grounded. They'll call you out, "Hey, you know, I mean, you're not a heart surgeon, you go home, that's for sure."

Host: Isn't that the truth? Dr. Marra, in closing, what's your philosophy of life or mantra?

Steven Marra, MD: My philosophy of life, I think you have to basically do the right thing. If you get up in the morning, first of all, you have to show up. So, that's true for any job. That's true for any directed goal that you have. And then, you have to care about what you're doing. I'll tell people, you know, if you show up and you care, I can work with you. And then, you have to try to just do the right thing. You don't have to figure out. It becomes so much easier in your life no matter whether you're going to work at a bank or whether you're going to work at a hospital or whether you're going to work at a steel factory, if you try to figure out, "What does my boss want me to do today?" And short of my job description or going to a hospital and you're going to a volunteer group, but what do I think that person wants me to do? It makes it so much easier if you show up and you care and you're going to do the best job that you can. And then, you want to do the right thing. And then, all your moral compass seems to become crystallized into a single lens of focus where you're going to do the right thing and then the chips will fall where they may. But you could always stand fast that, in that situation you showed up, you worked hard, you did the best that you could, and you were always trying to do the right thing. And I think that's a pretty good mantra.

Host: Well said. That's what my mom always said. You can only do your best, your very best, and then everything else is kind of out of your control, right? Well, it's been a lot of fun getting to know you, Dr. Marra. Thank you so much for telling us about your role at Beebe and sharing some things about your life outside of work. We so appreciate you and the work that you do.

Steven Marra, MD: Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it. You guys have a good rest of your day

Host: again, that's Dr. Steven Marra. And if you'd like to find out more, please visit beebehealthcare.org. That's beebehealthcare.org, B-E-E-B-E healthcare.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out our entire podcast library for topics of interest to you. This has been the Beebe Healthcare Podcast from Beebe Healthcare. Sussex County is our specialty. I'm Maggie McKay. Thanks for listening.