Miracle Man | Head Over Heels | S3-E1 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Dr. Death

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Episode: Miracle Man | Head Over Heels | S3-E1

Author: Wondery
Duration: 00:37:41

Episode Shownotes

Benita Alexander thinks she’s found the perfect surgeon to feature in her documentary: he’s charming, talented, and the creator of a groundbreaking surgery that involves implanting biosynthetic organs into his patients. Then Benita falls in love with him. Will she get her fairy tale ending?Need more Dr. Death? With Wondery+,

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Summary

In the first episode of season 3 of "Dr. Death" titled "Miracle Man | Head Over Heels," hosted by Laura Beil, we follow Benita Alexander, a documentary producer exploring the groundbreaking work of surgeon Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, known for creating synthetic tracheas. The episode reveals the complexities of their relationship, as Benita becomes emotionally tangled while documenting a revolutionary surgery for young Hannah Warren. Alongside the hope for medical advancement, ethical dilemmas and personal struggles unfold, leading to unforeseen tragedies and raising critical questions about the intersection of personal and professional lives in the world of medicine.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Miracle Man | Head Over Heels | S3-E1) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
A listener note. This episode contains adult content and language. This may not be suitable for all listeners.

00:00:11 Speaker_08
Inside the operating room in a Swedish hospital, there was a buzz of activity. But Dr. Kalle Grinnemo couldn't hear any of it. He was too focused on what was in front of him.

00:00:22 Speaker_04
This should be sort of the start of a new era when it comes to translational surgery and organ regeneration.

00:00:31 Speaker_08
It was the morning of June 9th, 2011. The team in this room was about to make history. For the first time, a windpipe manufactured in a laboratory would be implanted into a human. Leading this effort was Dr. Paolo Macchiarini.

00:00:49 Speaker_04
A few days before surgery, Paula asked me if I wanted to join in the operating theater and look at the operation. And I mean, this was like, you know, a rock star that asked me if I wanted to come and join them backstage.

00:01:11 Speaker_08
Dr. Grenemo didn't hesitate.

00:01:14 Speaker_04
It was a no-brainer at that time.

00:01:16 Speaker_08
Now, he stood at the foot of the operating table, looking over the patient's feet, up to his neck, where Dr. Macchiarini was working. And what he saw was how much pressure this surgeon was under.

00:01:28 Speaker_04
You could really look at him. He was extremely stressed.

00:01:32 Speaker_08
Dr. Macchiarini began by removing the patient's cancerous trachea. Once the old trachea was out, there was no turning back. The synthetic trachea had been wheeled into the operating room.

00:01:44 Speaker_04
It was pinkish, shaped like a Y, and made out of a thick plastic. He was cutting it to the right size and made injections of growth factors, and Paolo transferred it into the operating wound and started suturing.

00:02:15 Speaker_08
Macchiarini started to stitch the synthetic trachea into place, but he was struggling.

00:02:21 Speaker_04
Then happened the thing that should not happen. The whole pulmonary artery burst again, and there was a major, major bleeding.

00:02:30 Speaker_08
If something wasn't done, it would only be a few minutes before the patient bled out and died.

00:02:36 Speaker_04
And at that time, Paolo sort of, I don't really know what's happening there, but he just got so frustrated and he just said, take over, I'm leaving. He actually left the operating room with the patient bleeding like hell.

00:02:51 Speaker_08
Dr. Grinamo was surprised. He'd never seen a surgeon leave a patient in crisis like this. It seemed reckless and not what he would have expected from a world-famous surgeon.

00:03:04 Speaker_04
Paolo had a lot of pressure on his shoulders to be successful. And I guess when he's implanted the synthetic graft, he felt that now I actually done it. And then suddenly the patient start to bleed heavily.

00:03:18 Speaker_04
Then I guess he felt extremely frustrated and felt that this is not really fair. So he thought that the patient going to die.

00:03:27 Speaker_08
With Macchiarini out of the operating room, it was left to an assisting surgeon to step in and stabilize the patient.

00:03:34 Speaker_04
And he basically fixed it.

00:03:37 Speaker_08
A few minutes later, Dr. Macchiarini returned.

00:03:40 Speaker_04
So when he came into the room, it was like nothing has happened. No one said anything. Nothing.

00:03:47 Speaker_08
It was done. The new trachea was in. The patient was alive. The operation, a success. It had lasted close to nine hours and everyone was exhausted.

00:03:58 Speaker_04
So they asked me to close the patient because everyone was so tired they didn't actually have any energy left.

00:04:06 Speaker_08
Dr. Grinemo couldn't believe his luck. Now he wasn't just backstage with the rock star surgeon. He was closing out the set.

00:04:13 Speaker_04
I actually felt extremely honored to get the opportunity to close the first patient that received a synthetic tracheal graft.

00:04:25 Speaker_08
It felt like a hallelujah moment. This surgery meant that more biosynthetic transplants in humans might follow, kidneys and hearts and lungs. And Dr. Macchiarini had been the first one to do it.

00:04:39 Speaker_08
Celebrated, charming, at the cutting edge of medical science, Dr. Grinamo was proud to have been part of this groundbreaking surgery. But years later, he'd look back on that moment with a very different feeling.

00:04:56 Speaker_04
It sounds very ironic, but when you look back now, the best perhaps would have been that the first patient would have died in the operating room. Because if the patient had died at that time, then everything should have stopped.

00:05:13 Speaker_02
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00:06:15 Speaker_08
Join Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app to listen to Dr. Death Season 3, Miracleman, early and ad-free. From Wondery, I'm Laura Beale, and this is the third season of Dr. Death, Miracle Man. This is Episode 1, Head Over Heels.

00:06:45 Speaker_08
I became a health and science reporter because I was, and am, fascinated with how the body works.

00:06:52 Speaker_08
If you had to start from scratch, it would be hard to design a machine that operates as exquisitely as something like the immune system or even the human hand. And I like talking to people who study how to fix that machine when something goes wrong.

00:07:07 Speaker_08
Usually, science is incremental, small steps that come together to take us forward. But every now and then, someone proposes something so big and so provocative, it's hard not to be drawn in.

00:07:23 Speaker_08
Benita Alexander had just gotten back to her desk, Starbucks in hand, when she spotted an intriguing email. Hey Benita, just read this really interesting article over the weekend about a fascinating new field of medicine. Let me know what you think.

00:07:39 Speaker_08
It was late summer 2012. Benita was 14 years into her dream job, working as a producer for NBC at Rockefeller Center.

00:07:48 Speaker_07
She clicked the link. It was sort of this unbelievable, incredible sci-fi Frankenstein kind of thing where they were talking about the possibility of creating new organs in the lab.

00:08:02 Speaker_08
As she sipped her cappuccino, she read on. The article was about an incredible new development in medical science, and it focused on a particular Italian surgeon.

00:08:14 Speaker_07
Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, who was this Italian surgeon and scientist who was sort of at the forefront of this field. His nickname was the super surgeon.

00:08:25 Speaker_08
Dr. Macchiarini seemed close to doing something that no one had ever done before, build entirely new body parts in the lab and then successfully transplant them into people.

00:08:37 Speaker_07
This was this guy that wanted to change the future of medicine, wanted to help mankind, was willing to do whatever it took to get there, which meant leapfrogging over some of the boundaries of people saying, no, we need more time, we need to wait.

00:08:51 Speaker_07
He seemed to have this, a little bit of a rebellious sort of thing about him. And he sounded passionate about his work.

00:09:00 Speaker_03
This probably will help us to manufacture tracheas or as I said before, just going to the supermarket and then buying some organs. This same concept can be applied to the lungs.

00:09:15 Speaker_08
Benita pulled up article after article. In just a few short years, Dr. Macchiarini had made incredible progress.

00:09:23 Speaker_08
He'd started out by taking tracheas from dead bodies, stripping them of their cells, and then bathing them in the recipient's own stem cells before implanting them. And it had worked.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Just a few weeks after her pioneering operation and Claudia Castillo is able to breathe normally once more,

00:09:42 Speaker_08
But he'd gone further, doing something that was so incredible it took Benita's breath away. From his institute in Sweden, he and his fellow surgeons had carried out the first transplant of a bio-artificial trachea.

00:09:55 Speaker_07
It was like something out of science fiction. Any replacement body part that you need could just be made in a lab. which would be incredible, right, if that could actually happen. It would save so many lives.

00:10:06 Speaker_08
Benita's job was to find incredible true stories for Dateline. And now one was forming in her mind. Beer was something that could change the future of medicine. Dr. Macchiarini had performed five surgeries transplanting plastic tracheas in patients.

00:10:25 Speaker_08
Benita wanted to be there for the next miracle, to film it, so she typed out an email to a colleague telling her to find out about his next operation and hit send.

00:10:37 Speaker_08
A few days later, she heard back that Dr. Macchiarini was open to having Benita document his upcoming procedure. Macchiarini was 54 years old. He'd been born in Switzerland, trained in Italy.

00:10:49 Speaker_08
He'd worked all over the world, France, Spain, the United States, before landing a position at the famous Karolinska Institute in Sweden, home to the committee that selects Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine.

00:11:03 Speaker_08
For his next surgery, Dr. Macchiarini would be operating on a little girl named Hannah.

00:11:09 Speaker_07
who would be the youngest person in the world to ever receive one of his artificial tracheas. The way he described this little girl was heart-wrenching, that she had been in the hospital since the day she was born.

00:11:20 Speaker_08
Hannah Warren had been born in Seoul. Her dad was Canadian and her mom was Korean. At birth, doctors found her windpipe had never fully formed. Benita thought about her own daughter. She couldn't imagine what that must have been like for the parents.

00:11:36 Speaker_08
Benita reached out to Hannah's dad, Daryl. She wanted to center her documentary around their daughter's journey.

00:11:43 Speaker_07
They were told, there's nothing we can do for your daughter. It's hopeless. And they actually considered just kind of giving up on her. And they talked very openly and frankly about it, which I thought was really brave.

00:11:53 Speaker_08
But they hadn't given up on her. Instead, they had a breathing tube inserted through her esophagus, where food normally goes, into her lungs.

00:12:02 Speaker_08
It meant she'd have to get all her food through a feeding tube into her stomach and she'd need constant medical supervision so she could never leave the hospital.

00:12:11 Speaker_08
And doctors told Hannah's parents that no child with her condition had lived past the age of six.

00:12:17 Speaker_07
And they talked about so many terrifying scares at the beginning when they would get a call from the hospital that the tube had fallen out and Hannah had almost died.

00:12:27 Speaker_07
And then it was Daryl, her dad, who actually went on the internet, and this is how many people found Dr. Macchiarini, searched on the internet and up pops Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. And he contacted him.

00:12:39 Speaker_05
Her disease, her condition is so rare as well, but she needs one thing. She needs a trachea. And that's possible now. So if she can get her trachea, then she'll be fine. She'll be healthy.

00:12:59 Speaker_08
Now, Dr. Macchiarini was scheduled to give Hannah a new trachea. He was going to fly in and perform the surgery at Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria. It would be the first surgery of its kind in the United States.

00:13:12 Speaker_08
Benita wanted to set up the production schedule, but was waiting for a firm date for Hannah's operation. Then, Benita woke up to an urgent message.

00:13:25 Speaker_07
There was some kind of investigation in Italy and I remember somebody forwarded me an article that was in Italian.

00:13:32 Speaker_08
She could make out a few words in the headline and knew it was not good. So she quickly copied the text and pasted it into Google Translate. I just had this horrible feeling like, oh God, what does this mean?

00:13:45 Speaker_08
Dr. Macchiarini had been accused of trying to extort patients in Italy by telling them that they could get the operations they needed outside the country, but they'd have to pay in cash, and it would be for thousands of euros.

00:13:58 Speaker_07
And I remember emailing everybody immediately and calling people on the team like, whoa, wait a minute, you know, what's going on here?

00:14:06 Speaker_08
But when she heard back, it seemed like the whole thing was just a misunderstanding that had gotten out of hand.

00:14:11 Speaker_07
When the lawyers in Illinois, who were dealing with the FDA and dealing with getting Dr. Macarini a medical license, said, it's fine. We've looked into it. Everything's OK. He's cleared. I thought, OK, fine. Then everything must be OK, right?

00:14:26 Speaker_07
Because why would the FDA clear the way for this to happen? Why would they allow this man to do this? dangerous, quite frankly, radical surgery on a toddler in the U.S. if everything wasn't OK. So we just thought, OK, it's fine.

00:14:41 Speaker_07
Besides, Dr. Macchiarini had an explanation. And he just said, these are patients who are desperately ill. And at the facility where I'm working in Italy, we did not have the capacity to take care of them the way they needed to be taken care of.

00:14:57 Speaker_07
And I was trying to help them. And this is all a giant misunderstanding.

00:15:03 Speaker_08
Benita made plans to meet the doctor in Boston the evening before their interview. It would be their first time meeting in person. Benita and her colleagues settled into one of the booths at a sports bar and ordered some coffee as they waited.

00:15:19 Speaker_08
And waited.

00:15:21 Speaker_07
— He was late, and the thing was, because he was late, I was getting irritated. I'm, you know, I'm sort of no-nonsense when I'm working. I'm like, you know, let's get down to business, let's do what we need to do, let's go.

00:15:33 Speaker_07
And because he was late, I was annoyed.

00:15:35 Speaker_07
And I was probably also annoyed because it's a holiday weekend, and I'm sitting there in this bar drinking a cup of coffee, and I would have rather been sitting with a friend having a glass of wine at that point. Benita texted him.

00:15:46 Speaker_07
Are you still coming?

00:15:47 Speaker_08
Ten minutes went by. Then 20. Then 30. And still, he wasn't there. And then the door opened.

00:15:58 Speaker_07
So I can see him out of my peripheral vision on the right side.

00:16:02 Speaker_08
A well-dressed man with gray and silver hair, dark eyes, and a bright smile.

00:16:08 Speaker_07
And our eyes locked, and I felt like a schoolgirl. I felt butterflies in my stomach, and this kind of electric spark went through me. I think I was probably blushing. And I'm thinking, Benita. What is going on? What's happening?

00:16:24 Speaker_07
I've been a journalist for years. I've met all kinds of people. I've been to the White House. I've met presidents. I've met celebrities, been in celebrities' homes. Impressed by people, certainly, but not flustered, ever. Never flustered.

00:16:39 Speaker_07
And all of a sudden this man walks in, this Italian surgeon, this dashing, charming, very attractive Italian surgeon.

00:16:47 Speaker_08
It was like George Clooney from ER was walking toward Benita. Dr. Macchiarini was wearing tight jeans, a form-fitting blazer, and a gorgeous wool scarf wrapped artfully around his neck. He shook her hand and introduced himself.

00:17:02 Speaker_07
then ordered a beer. He's funny. He was making jokes and he was poking fun at himself. And so it was this interesting dichotomy because he's there is a little bit of this sort of Italian arrogance. And then there's this soft gentle side of him.

00:17:19 Speaker_07
And you could tell that he really cared about his patients.

00:17:23 Speaker_08
But there was also something else.

00:17:25 Speaker_07
He looked at me, our eyes locked, and he got this little smile on his face, and he cocked his head, and it was very subtle, but, you know, it was a little bit of a flirtatious smile, and something happened immediately. I felt like a silly schoolgirl.

00:17:40 Speaker_07
I was embarrassed, and I had no idea what had just happened. He's very, very charming, and he, in a way, oozes sex appeal.

00:17:51 Speaker_07
You know, he's Italian, he dresses very nicely, and obviously the things he's wearing are, you know, very expensive, and he just has, he's one of those people that when he walks into a room, you feel him, you notice him.

00:18:05 Speaker_07
I remember sort of joking with him before he left, don't be late, because the interview was first thing in the morning, and he said, don't worry, I won't be.

00:18:14 Speaker_08
Benita's worries faded. She couldn't have found a more charming subject for her documentary than this doctor.

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00:18:59 Speaker_02
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00:20:08 Speaker_08
With the first Dr. Macchiarini interview in the can, things moved quickly. Benita and her crew accompanied the doctor and his patient, Hannah Warren, from South Korea to Illinois, where the operation would take place.

00:20:25 Speaker_07
Hannah was about, I don't know, maybe eight rows behind us, with her nurses and her parents. And so we had this 13-hour flight, you know, and he's running back and forth, checking on Hannah and whatnot.

00:20:36 Speaker_08
Benita had already thought about the ending she was imagining for her documentary, that this miracle worker would give new life to this child.

00:20:45 Speaker_07
Maybe this little girl could come out of the hospital and go home and run around and play like a normal toddler and play with her big sister.

00:20:55 Speaker_08
As they got into the air and things started to calm down, Paolo sat next to Benita. And despite his focus being on Hannah. He could tell something was wrong and he asked me what was going on. His instincts were right.

00:21:07 Speaker_08
Something was going on in Benita's life. And so I started talking about it. She hadn't planned on sharing, but the truth was she'd almost had to back out of this work trip.

00:21:17 Speaker_08
Her ex-husband, who she was still very close to, was in and out of the hospital, and his health was getting rapidly worse.

00:21:24 Speaker_07
I just, I was kind of putting one step in front of the other, trying to deal with everything and get through everything, but inside I'm falling apart, you know? Despite the divorce, I still love my ex-husband. He's my daughter's father.

00:21:36 Speaker_07
I mean, I knew my daughter's father was about to die.

00:21:39 Speaker_08
Now the whole story of her ex-husband John's long illness just poured out of her. She told Paolo everything in pieces that were all mixed up.

00:21:49 Speaker_07
She told him how much John meant to her daughter and how she was struggling to figure out how to support her. How do you tell your daughter that her dad's going to die?

00:22:14 Speaker_07
You know, do you keep giving the child hope or do you have to be blunt at some point? And that was my biggest question to Paolo. When do I tell her? How do I tell her? What do I tell her?

00:22:25 Speaker_08
Paolo took a second, mulling over everything she'd just told him. And then he placed one hand on her knee and told her in a calm and self-assured voice,

00:22:36 Speaker_07
that I had to tell her that her father was going to die, and in a gentle way, that I had to prepare her for it, and not to make the mistake that a lot of adults make in that she's too young, she can't know the truth, she can't know what's going on, because then it's going to hit her like a two-by-four, and she's not going to be able to cope at all.

00:22:56 Speaker_07
She knew he was right. As a doctor and a surgeon, he could give me advice that nobody else could.

00:23:03 Speaker_07
He's dealt with many patients, obviously, who haven't made it, and he's had to deal with the families, and he's been in all those emotional situations, so I felt like I could ask him things and talk to him about things that I couldn't talk to other people about, not my friends, not my family.

00:23:17 Speaker_08
They talked for hours, only stopping every 15 or 20 minutes when Paolo had to go back to check on Hannah.

00:23:24 Speaker_07
And the other thing that struck me immediately was He asked me a lot of questions about my daughter and how she was doing and how she was reacting.

00:23:34 Speaker_07
And I remember being struck by the fact that, wow, he's never met her, but he seemed to genuinely care about her in the same way that he seemed to genuinely care about his patients.

00:23:49 Speaker_08
The day of Hannah's operation arrived on a cloudy Tuesday in Peoria, and Benita and her television crew were not the only ones paying attention.

00:23:59 Speaker_07
There are all kinds of news crews there. This is being covered. We're covering it. There's a network crew from Korea that's been covering it step by step. News organizations all over the world are waiting to see how this goes.

00:24:10 Speaker_07
This is this toddler getting this radical, groundbreaking transplant.

00:24:15 Speaker_08
Benita was just a short distance away in an impromptu media center with flat screen TVs and a live feed from the operating theater. She watched the surgery unfold with the other press.

00:24:27 Speaker_08
For close to nine hours, they watched and waited, teetering between hope and fear. Then, the doors opened and there was Paolo. Everything had gone according to plan.

00:24:40 Speaker_07
It was like, oh my God, it actually worked. It actually worked. And nothing went wrong. There are no complications. She's recovering beautifully.

00:24:49 Speaker_08
A few weeks later, Benita saw a video of Hannah that Dr. Macchiarini had emailed to her. the toddler was lying in a hospital bed, transformed. She no longer had a plastic tube lodged in her mouth.

00:25:04 Speaker_08
Instead, for the first time, Benita could see her smile, her full smile, from cheek to cheek.

00:25:10 Speaker_07
You have to remember, Hannah had never tasted food. She couldn't taste. She'd never touched her tongue to anything. And in the days following her surgery, I believe it was Paolo that brought it to her. He brings her a lollipop. Right?

00:25:25 Speaker_07
Every kid's favorite thing, right? It's sugar, it's sweet. What kid doesn't love a lollipop?

00:25:31 Speaker_07
And it's a beautiful little video because they just gently place the lollipop in front of her mouth and she's kind of licking it very tentatively and then this little smile creeps over her face just lighting up like, what is this? You know?

00:25:45 Speaker_07
Where has this been all my life? It's just lovely and everybody's laughing and then she kind of grabbed the lollipop and pulled it closer. She's like, I really like this. What is this? I want this.

00:25:54 Speaker_07
To me that symbolized so much because that's one of the simple joys of childhood is enjoying a lollipop. And this beautiful little toddler had never been able to do that. She had no idea what it was to taste sugar.

00:26:08 Speaker_07
It's like a blind person seeing for the first time or a deaf person hearing for the first time. It was just her eyes were wide with wonder and excitement and joy, just, it was like a whole new world for her.

00:26:22 Speaker_07
All of a sudden, here's a lollipop kind of opening the doors to the rest of her life and everything she'd missed out on. This was the dream. This was the ending, the fairy tale ending we all wanted.

00:26:35 Speaker_08
Then, the fairy tale ended.

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00:27:48 Speaker_08
In the weeks following Hannah's successful surgery, problems mounted for Benita. She'd been working hard on the documentary about Hannah's surgery, traveling from Korea to Illinois for work.

00:28:01 Speaker_08
And deep down, she'd been holding onto hope that her ex-husband John would somehow pull off a miracle of his own and recover. But that spring, he slipped into a coma. She'd missed her chance to say a proper goodbye. So, she kept working.

00:28:17 Speaker_08
But one day, while they were filming at the Children's Hospital in Illinois, Dr. Macchiarini noticed that something was weighing on Benita. They grabbed coffees from the cafeteria and went and sat outside the hospital.

00:28:31 Speaker_07
And Paolo, in his very sort of quiet, thoughtful, caring way, just he looked at me and he said, you need to find a way to say goodbye to him. You need to do something that honors him and your daughter and what the three of you had together.

00:28:46 Speaker_07
Otherwise, this is going to haunt you forever. And if you think of something, if there's something you can do, I'll help you.

00:28:53 Speaker_08
Later that night, she went back to her hotel room and thought about what he'd said. But as she lay in bed, she couldn't for the life of her figure out how to say her farewell.

00:29:07 Speaker_07
And I remember I woke up the next morning and I thought, I know exactly what I want to do. John's favorite flower is bird of paradise, which are these beautiful tropical majestic flowers and they're orange and purple and very vibrant.

00:29:21 Speaker_07
They're gorgeous. And we had had them at our wedding and he loved these flowers. And anytime he sent me flowers, they always included birds of paradise. So she picked up her cell and dialed Paolo. I said, I know what I want to do.

00:29:35 Speaker_07
I want to go and get birds of paradise. And I want to get three of them. One for John, one for me, one for my daughter. And I want to take them somewhere to say goodbye to him. And he said, OK, why don't I take you somewhere on the motorcycle?

00:29:49 Speaker_07
And I said, OK.

00:29:50 Speaker_08
Benita put on a pair of jeans, a jacket, and some heels and went downstairs to meet him. It was a perfect warm spring day with bright blue skies as far as you could see.

00:30:00 Speaker_07
And he shows up in his black leather, little black leather jacket and his fancy sunglasses and his tight blue jeans and, you know, I talk about George Clooney. I was like, OK, here comes Mr. Sexy Doctor to ride his motorcycle.

00:30:17 Speaker_08
Paolo was unusually quiet, only saying hi and asking her for the directions to the flower shop. She grabbed three birds of paradise, and as she got back onto the bike, I decided I wanted to throw these flowers in the water.

00:30:31 Speaker_08
As he started up the motorcycle, she pressed her knees into his sides and wrapped her arms around his waist. They made their way out to the Illinois River, following the curving road along its banks.

00:30:43 Speaker_07
The engine is loud, the cars are loud around you, the wind is rushing in your face. Everything's bigger and louder and more vibrant and you can smell everything, you can see everything.

00:30:56 Speaker_07
It's like you've been dropped right into the middle of the street and you're kind of part of the road. For me, being on the back of a motorcycle makes you feel very alive.

00:31:07 Speaker_08
They drove for half an hour just winding along with the river when Benita saw where she wanted to stop.

00:31:14 Speaker_07
I said, that's where I want to go. And we pulled over to this beautiful spot on the Illinois River with a little park. It was quiet. There was nobody there. And I got off the bike and I took the birds of paradise and I walked over to the water.

00:31:27 Speaker_07
Paolo stayed by the bike.

00:31:30 Speaker_08
She made her way to the water's edge alone and stood there holding the flowers.

00:31:35 Speaker_07
I was probably there for about 20 minutes in my own way saying goodbye to John and I was reflecting. We'd been together for 17 years. We were married for 11. We had this beautiful nine-year-old daughter.

00:31:50 Speaker_07
We had a beautiful history together and there were a lot of memories. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about everything my daughter was losing and he was an incredible father.

00:32:04 Speaker_07
You know, he had so much to teach her and she needed him and all these things are going through my head and that I am never going to be able to fill his shoes, that I'm facing an impossible task.

00:32:19 Speaker_07
I have to be everything for this little girl now and how am I going to do that? And I, quietly threw each one of the birds of paradise into the water. She started walking back toward Paolo, head down, tears in her eyes.

00:32:34 Speaker_07
And it was about four feet away from him that I finally stopped and I lifted up my head and our eyes met the same way they had met that very first time I saw him. But this was a very different look. Our eyes met and there was an understanding.

00:32:51 Speaker_07
There was this kind, compassionate, caring look in his eyes, this warmth, this welcoming warmth. And so when he opened his arms and reached out to hug me, it's like I just fell into his arms. I was walking away from pain.

00:33:08 Speaker_07
and walking into something that seemed warm and comforting and caring and hopeful, and I needed that desperately. I just knew it. At that moment, I knew this wasn't just a friendship.

00:33:21 Speaker_07
This was more than a friendship, and I was falling for this guy, which was a huge problem.

00:33:28 Speaker_08
Benita knew it was not okay to date one of the subjects in a documentary, but she rationalized it to herself. It was okay to date him because she'd already finished filming everything, except for one scene, the ending.

00:33:43 Speaker_08
Benita's plan was to film Hannah's joyous return to Korea. She'd been recovering at Children's Hospital of Illinois for three months, and it seemed like she'd be home before summer was even over.

00:33:54 Speaker_08
But as she went back to New York, she got a different kind of phone call.

00:33:58 Speaker_07
and told me that Hannah wasn't doing well. So I called Paolo and I said, what's going on? You know, this person tells me that Hannah's not doing well.

00:34:07 Speaker_07
And it was this long sigh and he said, yes, I don't understand what's happening and it's terrible and it really doesn't look good. And I said, what do you mean it doesn't look good? And he said, she might die.

00:34:22 Speaker_08
She heard him go silent. She couldn't believe what she was hearing.

00:34:26 Speaker_07
Here, I thought she was doing well, and he had said almost nothing to me about her, other than there were some slight complications. And now he's sort of bluntly saying, she might die.

00:34:36 Speaker_07
And I remember trying to probe him, and he said, I don't feel like talking about it. You know, I'll tell you about it when I see you in person. I can't get into details.

00:34:47 Speaker_08
Hannah Warren died on July 6, 2013. She was a month shy of her third birthday.

00:34:55 Speaker_07
I started crying. I had become so attached to this little girl and to her family. And I, for them, for her parents,

00:35:07 Speaker_07
And everything they had been through, every time I sat with those parents and they talked about what they'd been through with this little girl and all the hope they had placed in this man who was supposed to be the miracle doctor, who was supposed to be their only hope, to be Hannah's only hope, who was supposed to save the day, and now it had all gone terribly wrong.

00:35:31 Speaker_08
Paolo told her he didn't know what happened, but now Hannah was an angel on his shoulder, guiding him to be better next time. She had not died in vain.

00:35:42 Speaker_08
Her surgery had advanced the field of regenerative medicine, and her passing would only make Paolo more determined.

00:35:49 Speaker_03
She has dramatically changed the way of thinking. If before I was aggressive, now I'm even more. because these patients deserve it.

00:36:02 Speaker_08
Thousands of miles away, in Stockholm, Sweden, in an office of the Karolinska Institute, four doctors would have a very different kind of conversation about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini and what his patients deserved.

00:36:17 Speaker_10
At one point he says, I wonder if this guy's got ethical approval to do these surgeries.

00:36:24 Speaker_08
His colleagues looked at each other in disbelief.

00:36:27 Speaker_10
Of course he does. Come on, nobody would do that.

00:36:30 Speaker_08
Of course nobody would do that. Except nobody really knew the truth about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. Coming up on this season of Dr. Death, Miracle Man.

00:36:48 Speaker_04
The eyes was wide open and she was waving her arms. I mean, she was so scared that she was going to die.

00:36:56 Speaker_06
He's there, not in fucking Russia. You asshole. You fucking lying motherfucking ass.

00:37:03 Speaker_10
If I had to choose between Paolo Macchiarini's plastic trachea and a bullet in the back of the head, I'd take the bullet any day of the week.

00:37:11 Speaker_00
Whoever said love is blind wasn't kidding.

00:37:24 Speaker_08
From Wondery, this is episode one of six of Dr. Death season three, Miracle Man.

00:37:30 Speaker_08
The next episode will be out in a week, or you can listen to the next two episodes right now and add free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Or you can listen early on Amazon Music. I'm your host, Laura Beale.

00:37:47 Speaker_08
Producer is Nika Singh, who also reported this story. Fact-checking by Jacqueline Colletti. Production assistance from Fiona Pestana. Managing producer is Lata Pandya. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez. Sound design by Salt.

00:38:07 Speaker_08
Our executive producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent for Wondery.

00:38:16 Speaker_00
Did you know that after World War II, the U.S. government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s, the U.S.

00:38:27 Speaker_00
Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public? These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not.

00:38:39 Speaker_00
They're well-documented government operations that have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke Lamanna, a Marine Corps recon vet, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown.

00:38:51 Speaker_00
It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries. In it, I explore hidden truths and reveal some eye-opening events, like covert experiments and secret operations that those in power tried to keep buried.

00:39:05 Speaker_00
Follow redacted, declassified mysteries with me, Luke Lamanna, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen ad-free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.