Abstract
I met Roy Greenberg during his first month of internship at the University of Rochester. It was July, 1991. Roy was an intellectually precocious individual, knowledgeable beyond his years. Intelligence and social skills are often mutually exclusive but such was not the case with Roy; intellect was not his only gift. From the start, the surgical staff felt a special attraction to Roy. Roy elicited magnetism inside and outside the hospital.
Roy was always looking for that differentiator—a furtive piece of information on which to base a non-traditional and novel solution to an unsolved clinical problem. If we viewed the aorta from the front, Roy studied it from the back. Roy usually added another dimension, literally and figuratively, to the analysis of a disease. If a solution to a problem was in place, Roy spent no time contemplating the issues and limited his energies to unresolved problems. That said, there were no shortcuts for Roy. Irrespective of intellect, no brain is hard-wired with an inborn knowledge base. Roy strove to acquire the basic facts required to be a successful surgical resident; be they the hospital’s normal values for all 12 tests in the SMA-12, the branches and configuration of the circle of Willis, or the favorite interests of the service chief—golf, poker, cars, and other interests.
As a personal note, social gatherings were always more entertaining with Roy. Some of my most memorable occasions were the hours I spent waterskiing with Roy in upstate New York, traveling in European cities (and beaches), or snow skiing in the Rockies. I can state most assuredly that a similar level of friendship was shared by most of the members of our department.
In 1998, the Cleveland Clinic was the quintessential cardiovascular center and I had been offered the position of Chairman of Vascular Surgery. By this time, Roy and I had a seemingly inextricable bond that spanned academics, patient care, and camaraderie. Roy was instrumental in helping me to make the final decision to leave Rochester for the Clinic. We spent hours upon hours in discussion and strategizing. Ultimately, Roy agreed to join me in Cleveland in hopes of creating the world’s foremost endovascular program, offering a highly organized and systematic approach to patient care and training; a program that could only be achievable with the patient volume and the resources of the Cleveland Clinic. Roy’s interest in vascular surgery was inspired by his father Don Greenberg’s pioneering efforts in computer graphics. Roy was determined to apply some of the same principles to an image-guided approach to aortic disease. At the Cleveland Clinic, the technical and clinical knowledge base of each vascular surgeon and cardiovascular surgery as a whole progressed at an exponential fashion from our interactions with Roy. Roy encouraged each of us to consider issues from a different angle; to confront important clinical challenges from the imaging, technical, and engineering perspectives all at once.
Roy conquered virtually every clinical, technical, and academic challenge. Sadly, his own disease was the one battle that he could not win. Vascular surgery has forever lost an individual that truly defied the status quo—someone who was singularly responsible for accelerating the pace of technology to the benefit patients with vascular disease. Roy Greenberg will be impossible to replace; it will be a long time before the chance juxtaposition of intellectual capacity, competitive nature, and technical skills reappear in another pioneer. Roy’s memory will endure through his contributions to our field and in the hearts and minds of his patients, his friends and his wife Alicia, his two sons Zachary and Lucas, his brother Eric and sister Jane, and his parents Don and Iris.
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. – Marcus Tullius Cicero