Type.Tune.Tint.

Saved by Music and Playing It Forward

February 22, 2022 Tom Kranz Season 3 Episode 2
Type.Tune.Tint.
Saved by Music and Playing It Forward
Show Notes Transcript

Is it possible to save a life with music? It is not only possible but a medical reality as we hear from Andrew Schulman, a professional musician whose near-death experience and miraculous recovery is the subject of his first book, Waking the Spirit. Hear about his harrowing surgical experience during which his vital signs bottomed out causing clinical death, the frantic resuscitation effort and the medically induced coma. As his doctors and nurses agreed he would most likely not survive, his desperate wife found his iPod, placed the earphones on him and hit "PLAY". Within 30 minutes, the St. Matthew Passion by Bach stabilized Andrew's vital signs, reignited his will to live and, with intensive and remarkable care by the doctors and staff at New York's Beth Israel Hospital, slowly brought him back. Thus, he found a new calling--bringing his guitar and musical passion to the bedside of other critically ill patients. Today he is a Certified Medical Musician and a recognized expert on the healing power of music.

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:00 Musical interlude

: 23 Tom Kranz
Hello and welcome to the Independent Author podcast. I’m Tom Kranz. You’re listening to music by a master classical guitarist who is my guest today. Andrew Schulman has been a professional musician living and working in New York City all his life. He has performed at Carnegie Hall and venues around the US and London. Today, he is pursuing a new calling, precipitated by his near-death experience in 2009 and a miraculous recovery which he directly attributes to music. It’s all detailed in the book we’ll talk about today called Waking the Spirit. The tune we’re hearing, by the way, is Venezuelan Waltz Number 3 by Antonio Lauro.

How are you?

1:09 Andrew Schulman
Hi, Tom, it's great to be here and I'm fine. How're you doing?

Tom Kranz
I'm good and you're in your Manhattan.

Andrew Schulman
Correct.

Tom Kranz
I'm in New Jersey. So we're dangerously close, So we met and we worked the summers of '73 and '74 together, and now it's 40, uh, good God, I don't even want to count. It's a whole lot of years later and Andrew looked me up as he looked up another mutual friend of ours who were playing you know together, and we're going to talk about part of Andrew's life that I had no idea about and you're going to learn about now. And when you finish this you're going to want to go out and buy this book and become a fan like I was for years, like I rediscovered now.  So Andrew first of all tell me what you're doing now. You've, you've been, you've played in many places for many people, I'll give some idea just kind of what your life is like right now.

2:08 Andrew Schulman
Well, of course, everybody's life is affected by the pandemic. So for the last two years I have not been outperforming as a guitarist. In fact, I was very lucky in that I had a concert at Carnegie Hall just a couple of months before the pandemic started because all those unfortunate people who were booked there after that lost that opportunity even though it's it is back now.  So I have all through the year since my college days graduating from college when I moved into New York and became a professional guitarist. I have been playing the guitar. I've also become a writer and my first book which is the one that you've read is Waking the Spirit, which was released in 2016, and that tells the story about how not only did music save my life, but because of that experience, and when I say, save my life medically speaking, I mean this a very detailed story about what happened when I was in a coma and music was played for me. And as a result of that experience, I wound up becoming what I call a medical musician. A lot of people familiar with the field called music therapy. I a not a music therapist. What I do though, has similarities, of course. It's using music in a healing way. And so I became a medical musician at the hospital where my surgery was and where my life was saved by music that was Beth Israel Hospital in downtown, New York, and I did that for seven years there. I was also for one year at NYU Langone Hospital, also in New York.

4:00 Tom Kranz
Okay, let's hold on a second because we're gonna get into that in some detail.  So they say that life is made up of a series of turning points. That certainly was the case for me along the way and based on what I know about you and what I read about you, it certainly seems like there were some key turning points that changed your life, you know, in your 50s and now that you're, you know, a little bit older even you're doing stuff that I bet you never thought when you were, you know taking people out on the boat at Quisisana, you know, 40 years ago that you would be doing--What did you think you would be doing at that point when you were that age at this point in your life?

4:42 Andrew Schulman
Well, from an early age, I just wanted to always want to be a musician. And so at an early age at that time, I actually had a mentor in college. His name was, Richard Dyer Bennett. He was known as the 20th-century minstrel. Very interesting guy and I had professors in college also, my music professors, and basically what I saw at those early in those early 20s was that you made a life in music and it took you where it took you. That's all I was really thinking, that I would be a guitarist and it would take me where it took me.

Tom Kranz
And it has taken you to a number of cool places. You've traveled to places around the world. You've played for some important people, it seems like. And now, you're also playing for some important people, but it's a completely, completely different scenario. So this podcast is about authors and about books, so I don't want to wait any longer to get to the fact that we're going to spend a lot more time now, talking about your first book called Waking the Spirit. This book was published about looks like five years ago or so.

Andrew Schulman
2016.

Tom Kranz
Okay, and it's on  Picador Press, is the name of the publisher.

Andrew Schulman
Yeah, Picador is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

Tom Kranz
Okay, And it's available in all the usual places.

Andrew Schulman
Yeah.

Tom Kranz
But this is a book that, you know, when you look at this book, you really have, you know, it's a kind of lovely cover and a lovely design, but you really,  from almost the first two pages, I was immediately sucked into the story. And the first, I guess, four, or five chapters that detail all the crap, basically, that happened to you in such a short period of time, kind of out of nowhere, it reads like a movie. I mean, it really does. It reads like, this really happened to this guy? So take us to 2009, if you will. You were, you know minding your business, having your life, and you had a scan looking for something else. Tell us quickly what transpired and how that worked.

6:37 Andrew Schulman
Well, I had to have an abdominal scan because we needed to see if I had inherited something, a defect in my aorta that my father had, which killed him. And I didn't inherit that, but the scan picked up at the top part of my pancreas two cysts they were seeing that were concerning.  And what the doctor said was, let's come back in about 10 months and take a look again, see what's going on. Ten months later, those cysts were not a problem but what had not been there ten months before was a mass, the size of a walnut on the tail of my pancreas with ragged edges. And that that's just a clear sign of pancreatic cancer. So, I had a diagnosis basically of pancreatic cancer.

Tom Kranz
And then those doctors, and it was more than one doctor, who concurred that it was 90 plus percent positive.

Andrew Schulman
Correct. Yeah. Four. Three doctors said a hundred percent, one doctor said 98%.

7:48 Tom Kranz
So there you are. Now you've got the diagnosis. Your wife is freaking out, I'm sure. So, so then what happens next?

Andrew Schulman
Well, surgery was scheduled, and then a series of events life-changing events happened. A procedure was done in the middle of the surgery, which was just to cross the T and dot the I. The mass was removed and taken to the pathology downstairs and it's a procedure that takes a few minutes just to verify its cancer. And lo and behold, it's not cancer. It was not malignant, it was benign.

Tom Kranz
So you had kind of prepare for the idea of that you, you might die.

Andrew Schulman
I was given a 3.9% chance of living two more years.

Tom Kranz
Right.  And of course, your wife shared this pain and probably had at least as many sleepless nights as you. And then you found out or she finds out that it wasn't cancer. Oops!

8:50 Andrew Schulman
Yeah. So, the surgeon is overjoyed, puts me back together again. They didn't have to remove all of my pancreas, just the mass. So that was a huge, important thing. And the surgeon, as I'm being sewn up, the surgeon goes downstairs, tells my wife, she jumps for joy, it's like amazing, great news.  And then his beeper goes off telling him that he's got to get to the surgical ICU immediately. So what they didn't know was when they were downstairs talking when they sewed me up and put me on the gurney to take me to the surgical ICU, which we call the SICU by the way, before we even got to the door of the operating room, all of a sudden my blood pressure, just bottomed out. And when that happens the race is on. Because within a few minutes after your blood pressure bottoming out, your heart is going to stop. And they didn't make it.  When five minutes later, when they arrived in the SICU, I was clinically dead.

Tom Kranz
So you went from, or I guess your wife went from, because you were out, right? Your wife went from this elation of, oh my God, he's gonna be okay, he doesn't have cancer, to five minutes later.  Now you're near death and I'm guessing that on the way to the, on the way to wherever you were going, they probably were pumping your chest, and doing CPR, and doing the usual interventions, intubating, attaching all kinds of lines to you. And so, you never woke up from the surgery, essentially that day.

Andrew Schulman
Right?

Tom Kranz
And so, try to compress the next day the next week or so for us.

Andrew Schulman
Well, what happened is I was put into a medically-induced coma that night as soon as they resuscitated me and got my heart started again. I'm in the medically-induced coma and nobody there, no doctor or nurse, thought that I would survive this.

Tom Kranz
Why did they put you in a coma?

Andrew Schulman
Just to buy time. It buys time and it helps preserve brain function.

Tom Kranz
Got ya.

Andrew Schulman
So, the assumption was and in fact, I arrived in the SICU 9 PM on Thursday night. They revived me at three in the morning. I flatlined a second time because they changed something else in the medication. The bottom line, no one thought that I would even survive a day. I get through miraculously through great medical care. I get to the third day noon. On the third day of the coma, my lactic acid number is 17. Normal is 1.8. Most people are dead by the time it's 10. So clearly I'm within maybe minutes, I'm about to die. And this is when the miracle happens. The miracle is that my wife reaches into her bag, to get her phone, sees my iPod and the light bulb goes off over her head. She turns to the doctor and says his heart is beating but his soul isn't. He loves music more than anything else. I think only music can give him the will to live. Many doctors would not have allowed the iPod in because you put the iPod in, I drop dead, he gets sued for malpractice, right?  But, but this was a cool guy and he said, you can have 30 minutes and he said at the first sign of agitation pull out the earbuds.  Now, no one knows what to play. So they just hit the first track on my iPod, and that's where also incredibly lucky because that was my ultimate favorite piece of music, the Saint Matthew Passion from Bach. The music goes in and in short, I'll simply tell you by the end of the 30 minutes, everybody's standing around amazed and looking at the vital signs monitor. For the first time in three days I begin to stabilize and other signs of recovery start happening immediately. And by the end of the afternoon, my lactic acid numbers drop way down. And it doesn't wake me up, but it stabilizes me and literally, it saves my life. The music, reversed the metabolic process that was killing me and it's all in the chart. And there were doctors and nurses there.  So, it's not from something else. It was the music, the intervention.

13:20 Tom Kranz
So, while this was going on, were you aware-- they tell me that when people are in a coma they can actually hear--could you hear? Where you aware of anything?

Andrew Schulman
Absolutely. I was aware of everything really.  And there's the thing called coma dreams. They're not real dreams, it's sort of almost hallucinations or everything goes through the drugs that you're on because of the coma and whatever else is going on. I actually had a coma dream which is way too long to tell you now but I had a coma dream. It's in the book, of the moment that the music was played for me. Something happened with music and in the coma dream. So I was aware. Plus, you know you forget your dreams? You don't forget coma dreams. At least I didn't. Some patients do they were patients that don't forget them. Right to this day, it's 12 years later, 13 years later, I remember all of those coma dreams. So what happens is that on the day of the music, I stabilize and they realize my life has been saved. They then take three days to very gradually take me out of the coma. You can't do it right away quickly.  You have to do a very slowly. Then, without giving away too much, I'll just say once I'm out of the coma and I realized even before I knew that music had saved my life, I knew that I had been saved by an extraordinary event. I knew that very quickly and I knew that I had to give back and I didn't have money to donate to the hospital. But I had my guitar and I decided the day I came out of the coma and found out a little bit of what had happened, I decided that I had to go back there with my music to help people who were critically ill in the ICU. The chief doctor, Dr. Marvin McMillan was a music guy and he had had a music therapy program going on there, but it was something called environmental music. It was a few musicians off in a corner of the room. I wanted to go and go to bedsides, and that's what he wanted. So, when I was leaving the hospital, we had a few minutes to talk to him and he had met me but I had never met him. He met me when I was dead. He took care of me you know, and his extraordinary care in the first few days is a big factor, why I made it to the third day. And so he agreed that he would like to follow up on this idea. He told me to go home and get better, which I did. I went back to hospital and I thought I was only gonna go a few times, maybe as a little thank you. But from the very first day that I was in there, I realized I found a new calling in life and I started it. I became very, very committed to doing this right from literally, from the first day.  I went back. I spent a first hour and it wasn't at bedsides. I didn't know how to go to a bedside. So I have no formal training. I did not go to school to become a medical musician, but I had maybe the best training you could have, which was on-the-job training in an ICU where they had saved my life.  So they were predisposed to doing everything they could to help me.

16:50 Tom Kranz
So, aren't you, is there like, a certification now that you essentially created, or that was created for you?

Andrew Schulman
Yeah. I have a certification from Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts from the head of medical education there and it's a co-certification. He's also a dean at the University of Massachusetts medical school. So, in 2018, when I had verified 2,000 hours of clinical work, and I had already written the book, a book like that is sort of kind of like a dissertation. So I had verified hours in the unit and I had doctors who wrote on my behalf and I had written Waking the Spirit, which has a lot of research in it.  So he wrote me a certification. I'm currently a member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and I'm listed with them as a Certified Medical Musician.

Tom Kranz
And are you still doing it? Are you still going to hospitals and playing?

Andrew Schulman
No. I was going right up until the beginning of the pandemic. And then when the pandemic started, the lockdown started. I agreed to a new position as a medical musician, as the visiting artist in the arts and humanities program at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. The woman who runs that program had read my book, knew of my work, had come to a workshop that I gave in the Berkshires the summer before. And the reason that they brought me in there was so I could start a medical musician program in Georgetown and more important they were putting together the material for a major new study on the effect of music in ICU and it's a study that they got a big grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and they were looking for the right musician for it. And I was very honored to be asked by them to be the musician for the study. I recorded the--can't do that live, partly because of COVID but you can't do a study like that live because it has to be exactly the same music presentation for each of the 60 patients they do it for. It has to be a recording, but they wanted me to curate a program, which I did. I recorded it. There are three 15-minute sets, morning, noon, and evening. And it's music that's what I call my penicillin pieces. From experience, I have a repertoire of music that's very, very effective in the ICU. So, the music is already finished for the study. They're about to start it very soon. It's going to take about three months to do the study for the 60 patients, then we're going to see what the data shows. You know. We are hoping of course that that shows is going to show great things. Music and medicine is really, really a growing thing. It's taken a big it in the last two years because of COVID. There still has been some music done in hospitals, even during COVID. But what I do, you can't do with COVID because what I do is going right into the bedside.

20:38 Musical Interlude

20:58 Tom Kranz
We’ll hear more about Andrew’s writing journey after this word from Paul Lytle’s Perilous Realms podcast.

21:04 Promo for Paul Lytle's Perilous Realms

20:24 Tom Kranz
And you’re back with the Independent Author podcast. I’m Tom Kranz with Andrew Schulman. Let's talk a little bit more about Waking the Spirit. So this was your first book?

Andrew Schulman
Yeah.

Tom Kranz
What parallels do you find between writing and making music as an artist?

Andrew Schulman
Well yeah, you come up with a theme and you develop it. It's all about communicating with either your audience or your reader. And the interesting thing, the connection that I make the most as a medical musician is that I say that a medical musician is a storyteller in sound.

Tom Kranz
Did you just one day set sat down and start writing, or did you have a plan? Did you make outlines? Or did you just say the hell with that, I just got to start getting stuff down on paper?

Andrew Schulman
Well, when I returned to the ICU from the very, very first day, I kept a journal. I was going three days a week and it was a really detailed--I would go in there and spend an hour and eventually became closer to two hours. And I would go home, and I would write down all the details, who I played for and what I played for them and anything that I noticed that happened, things that doctors said nurses said. After about a month, I started sending that journal as a PDF to a few friends, a few of the doctors I was working with and right from the beginning, everybody was saying you've got to write a book. This is really, really interesting.   So within a few months, the idea was, okay, a book should come out of this but of course, I knew that I would have to be in there for a while to have enough material but the idea for the book came on pretty early.  After doing the journal, then I put together not a formal book proposal but I put together--it's a funny story--my wife, who is a folk singer and singing, in the Under New York program at Grand Central, had a fan who himself was not a book agent but in his work, he worked a lot with book agents and one day she told him about me and what I was doing and he said, have him put together three to five sample chapters and a bio and I'll see if I can help you.  It took me about six months to put that together. We sent it to him. And a week later, he called, and he said, it's really good. And if you'd like, I can help you get a book agent and of course, we jumped at the chance for that. And he found the right person within one day. I had a wonderful editor. Her name is Lindsay Tate.

Tom Kranz
That's a huge help.

Andrew Schulman
And when we finished writing,  I remember we were talking one day and I said, okay, tell me the truth now. What do you think of my writing? Because I'm a professional musician, not a professional writer. And she said, it really is very good writing and she laughed. She said her hardest job was turning my 20-page chapters into 10-page chapters.

Tom Kranz
Yeah, I believe it.

Andrew Schulman
Yeah. So overwriting is pretty common.

Tom Kranz
Well, that's good. That's, you know, the combination of great content, compelling content and good writing is like, that's the dream, man. Yeah, so good for you. I want to remind everybody that the name of the book is Waking the Spirit, Andrew Schulman, it's S-C-H-U-L-M-A-N. He has a website. Google his name, it comes right up. The book is available on Amazon. And as I said, even if you're not, you know, a foam-at-the-mouth musician or somebody who's, who's got all this great interest in music, it's still for you because this story of the kind of the diligence of the doctors, the dedication and the loyalty of Andrew's wife, we talk about a saint, I think you said that yourself. She's got to be a remarkable woman. And just kind of everything that came together to make this story great is, as I said, it's going to make a great movie one day. So I appreciate your time and I'm sorry that COVID has sidelined you like it has many other people, but slowly but surely, we're all coming back and I hope to see you on the stage in person soon.

Andrew Schulman
Well, thank you so much Tom and I appreciate everything you are doing.

Tom Kranz
Be well and I will look for Andrew Schulman at the next life's milepost.  Andrew thanks so much.

Andrew Schulman
Thank you, Tom

27:20 End

All music used with permission from Andrew Schulman
1. Venuzuelan Waltz #3, Antonio Lauro
2. Fugue In A Minor, BWV 1000, J. S. Bach