Robert T. Sessions, MD

Robert T. Sessions, MD, Surgeon and Inventor, Dies at 79 Depending on whom you ask, Robert Thomas Sessions will be remembered as a circuit riding country doctor who made house calls and accepted chickens and vegetables in exchange for his services, as an innovative cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon who opened his hospital’s first dedicated Intensive Care Unit and the Southeast USA’s first Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, as an unofficial ‘Doctor without Borders’ who dug wells and ran health clinics in India and saw patients in Yemen, as an accomplished mountaineer with more than 30 ascents of Colorado’s Long’s Peak to his credit, as a self-taught restorer of vintage automobiles, as a furniture craftsman, surgical equipment inventor, high school championship golfer, Bible studies teacher, Contra dance enthusiast, bird watcher, squirrel foe, clinical researcher, medical malpractice investigator, expert horseman, and dedicated practical joker. Known to one and all as “Dr. Bob,” RT Sessions died in his daughter Kimbi’s home on November 12, at the age of 79 from complications secondary to having broken a hip in September, 2009. During his peaceful passing he was encircled by his children and their love as contra dance music by Anam Cara (Gaelic for “friend of my soul”) played in the background. In his final moments his family talked him up the path of his beloved Long’s Peak and sang him to the summit with the acapella strains of “Amazing Grace.” Born into the family of one of Marietta’s earliest settlers, Dr. Sessions saw patients for 33 years in a small house within walking distance of the wards and operating theatres of Kennestone Hospital. Only after buying the wood frame building in 1963 did he discover that his new office was the first house his parents had owned as newlyweds in the 1920s. After his retirement, Dr. Sessions’ daughter Melissa converted the office back into a house and raised her own family there, making four generations of the family to reside at 811 Church St. Ext. When the office furniture was cleared out Balu, the Himalayan Sloth bear that Dr. Sessions shot in India when it turned man-eater and began making midnight raids on the village in which his clinic was located, remained in place to continue startling new generations of visitors coming in the front door. As a solo practitioner and one of the few oncology-trained thoracic and cardiovascular surgeons in Georgia, Dr. Sessions worked punishingly long days, seven days a week and, like the mail, never permitted weather to be an obstacle. One winter, when Marietta was in the grip of a particularly severe ice storm, he stretched climbing ropes from tree to tree through several acres of steep woods and then broke out an ice axe and crampons used in his mountaineering days in order to hike from house to road where a police car was kept waiting to take him to the hospital. Family was very important to Dr Sessions and formed a cornerstone of his medical approach. He was obsessive about being available to family members of his patients around the clock, routinely covered all food and lodging expenses for out-of-town family of indigent patients – and occasionally bullied Kennestone staff into providing a room and food in the hospital itself for out-of-town family he felt needed to be immediately available. As his daughter Kimbi said: “At our house we ate late and ate fast so that we could squeeze in dinner as a family between office visits, operations, and evening rounds. As the kid whose seat at the table was closest to the telephone it was my job to field dinner time calls from patients and their families and I was never permitted to say ‘He’s not available,’ but rather ‘He is eating dinner, do you need me to get him right away?” “The pace he set for himself was relentless,” she continued. “In fact I can not remember one single night of my growing up life in which, if we were home in Marietta, he wasn’t called back to the hospital in the middle of the night at least one or more times.” As a result, Dr. Sessions’ lovingly maintained 1959 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud was a familiar site cruising the late night roads of Marietta between home and hospital. Dr. Sessions kept up a life-long correspondence with his far flung patients and, black bag in hand, would drive the Silver Cloud to see them in their homes in the mountains of North Georgia after age and infirmity made it difficult for them to continue making the trip to Marietta. He also acted as a de facto circuit-riding surgeon, regularly making the rounds of North Georgia hospitals that were too small to support a full time surgeon of their own. Whenever possible, Dr. Sessions combined work and family life, taking one or more of his children along with him on house calls, and his oldest daughter’s earliest memory in life is of sitting on her father’s shoulders, looking down a hospital corridor. His kids were present for the last two operations he performed before retiring; being reminded, as always, beforehand: “If you feel sick, go to that corner of the room to throw up. And if you faint, please step away from the table first and be quiet when you hit the ground so as not to disturb anyone.” Travelling out of town was particularly popular with the Sessions -- in the days before cell phones, taking him out of town was the only reliable way that Dr. Sessions’ wife Jean could ensure he got the occasional night of uninterrupted sleep. As his youngest daughter Jean says: “I lived for our family vacations because Dad always made sure they were not your average trip and because for two weeks I knew Dad was all ours!” When they weren’t travelling, the Sessions worked as a family to meticulously restore a 1929 Rolls Royce 20/25 Shooting Brake. “All of us had a job to do on the car; it’s the main way we spent time with Dad,” says his son Rob. The family’s goal was to prepare the car to be competitively judged at a national meeting of the Rolls Royce Owners Club (RROC), an organization for which Dr. Sessions had, at various times, served as Chief Judge (national) and Director (Rebel Region). In 2003, after 20 years of self-taught work, the Sessions nervously packed up the Shooting Brake and had it trucked to an RROC national meet in Newport, Rhode Island, driving it the last 100 miles, per competition regulations. “We were all terrified that after all those years of work it would break down or be damaged in traffic,” says daughter Melissa, “but everything went beautifully up until the very last minute.” That was when field judges, in evaluating the car a second time in order to break a tie between the Sessions’ car and another in its class, discovered a couple of screws that weren’t original to the Shooting Brake’s era securing a panel under the car. It was later discovered that when the family sent the car out to be painted the shop misplaced some of the screws Dr. Sessions had provided and substituted their own modern ones without notifying the family. “It probably never crossed their mind that it would matter,” said son Rob, “but those screws became the difference between first and second place.” Such was Dr. Session’s depression over the near miss that it took him a long time to react to the awards banquet announcement that he had, instead, won the RROC’s top award, the highly coveted Guerrero Prize for best personally restored automobile. “I’ll never forget the look on Dad’s face when he realized what our family had won,” says his daughter Jean, “After working together on the car all of our lives, it was one of the most exciting moments we ever had as a family.” Both the Silver Cloud and the Shooting Brake will be on view at the visitation at Mayes Ward funeral home on Sunday, November 15th (7:00 – 9:00 pm) and will be used to drive Dr. Sessions ashes to his memorial service at the First United Methodist Church on Saturday, December 12, 2009 (3:00 pm). Robert Thomas Sessions was born on June 17, 1930, the oldest of four children born to Archibald Drake Sessions and the former Gladys Thomas. As a boy, Bob fell in love with the Rocky Mountains as a camper and then counselor at Cheley Colorado Camps in Estes Park, Colorado. Although he eventually won every one of the Camp’s highest competitive and honorary awards, his devotion to mountaineering was his first love. In 1950, to celebrate his 20th ascent of Long’s Peak (elevation 14,256 feet), he and fellow Cheley alum Bill Bunten donned tuxedos and, standing next to a hand made sign stating: “The Estes Park Chamber of Commerce Welcomes You,” spent the day handing glasses of champagne to startled, bone weary tourists as they reached the summit of the highest "14er" in the Colorado Rockies. Mountaineering also played a part in Dr. Sessions successful wooing of his wife. Family legend has it that in June of 1955 he asked Jean Ann Warren out on their first date ... for three months later, when he got back from spending the summer mountain climbing in the Rockies. “Frankly, I wasn’t at all enthusiastic about going out with him but I couldn’t think of a graceful way to say ‘I’m already busy’ to an invitation that far in the future,” said Jean, each time she retold the story. Bob’s strategy paid off and Dr. and Mrs. Robert T. Sessions were married on March 17, 1956. They enjoyed a long and love-filled life together, celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary two months before Jean’s death on May 19, 2006. Always each other’s #1 fan, Bob and Jean supported each other in the development of a calling new to both of them in their later years – as teachers of Sunday School and Bible study at the First United Methodist Church in Marietta. “It was a time of intellectual and spiritual growth for them,” says their daughter Melissa, “their more than fifteen years of service to the discipleship group brought them even closer to each other and to the Lord.” Dr. Sessions was a devoted practical joker. Whether it was filling every inch of a daughter’s bedroom with wrapping paper on her birthday, and then giving her a deadline to find the present hidden inside; re-writing history during a Civil War re-enactment when, against script, he escaped the soldiers who were leading him on horseback to prison behind enemy lines and galloped back across the field of battle into safe territory, steering the horse with his knees because his hands were tied behind his back; buying an extra hour of sleep on Christmas morning by running miles of string in an elaborate spider’s web throughout the house and requiring that his children find their Christmas stockings by each following their own trail, carefully re-rolling the balls of string as they went; or tricking his longtime secretary Betty Davis into meeting him at the Atlanta airport, where she and her husband were presented with surprise airline tickets, pre-packed suitcases, and a fully worked out pre-paid itinerary for a three day trip to New York City; Dr. Sessions loved playing practical jokes on family and friends, the more elaborate the better. What goes around comes around though and in 1992, after months of planning, dozens of friends and family members ganged up to stage “Project Payback,” an elaborate, all day series of interlocking jokes at Dr. Sessions expense, ending up at his daughter Melissa’s house for dinner and a lot of “gotcha” laughter by the perpetrators. After the death of his wife in 2006 Dr. Sessions spent his time completing the write up of reports of his extensive travels; cheering his grandchildren to victory in soccer, swimming, tennis, and martial arts; attending a weekly Contra dance to waltz with his daughter; refinishing furniture; happily playing golf at something less than his high school championship level (“I took several walks in the woods, heard some birds, and found more balls than I lost. It was a good round”); and struggling determinedly with the effects of primary progressive aphasia, a rare neurological condition that gradually reduced his ability to speak clearly and understand what others were saying. Dr. Bob is survived by his daughters, Kimberly Hagen, Melissa Bothwell, and Jean Wilund and his son Rob Sessions. In addition to his children, Dr. Bob’s family includes his wife Jean (deceased); four sons- and daughter-in law – Karl Hagen, Kathy Wolf Sessions, Jim Bothwell (deceased), and Larry Wilund; six grandchildren – Katelyn and Kristy Sessions, HannahBrooke Bothwell, and Bobby, Brittany, and Carolyn Wilund; two brothers – Dr. Don Sessions (St. Louis) and Dr. David Lee Sessions (Portland, OR), and one sister – Melissa English (deceased); 15 nieces and nephews; two society finches (Falcon 1 and Falcon 2), and hundreds of friends, colleagues, and former patients. The Sessions will receive friends from 7:00 – 9:00pm on Sunday, November 15, at Mayes Ward funeral home on Church Street in Marietta. A memorial service is planned for Saturday, December 12, at 3:00pm, First United Methodist Church on the Marietta Square. Please join the family for one or both to celebrate a life well lived and a father, physician, humanitarian, and Anam Cara well loved.

Robert T. Sessions, MD

November 13, 2009