UVA Club of Middle Tennessee: Meet the Author - Dr. Jay Wellons
All alumni, friends, and families are invited to join the UVA Club of Middle Tennessee to meet Dr. Jay Wellons, author of All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience. We will discuss his book at a private residence. The address will be provided in your confirmation email.
For more information, please contact Amy Cors Flinn (Col '89, PAR '19) at amy@amyflinn.com or 615-509-0047.
About the Book:
"As a surgeon, Jay Wellons has long healed with his hands. What this engaging and illuminating book shows us is how important the heart is in the life and work of a doctor charged with the sacred—even staggering—task of operating on the brains of children. At once reflective and searching, Wellons’s stories from the journey give us hope that light can emerge from even the darkest of hours.”
-Jon Meacham
"ALL THAT MOVES US tells the story of lives that have been shattered and reassembled. The surgical interventions in these pages are dizzying, but the fact that Jay Wellons can write as well as he can operate provides a whole other level of amazement. This is a wondrous and deeply moving book."
-Ann Patchett
In ALL THAT MOVES US: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience (Random House Hardcover; On Sale: June 28 2022), Dr. Jay Wellons pulls back the curtain to reveal the profoundly moving triumphs, haunting complications, and harrowing close calls that characterize the life of a pediatric neurosurgeon, bringing the high-stakes drama of the operating room to life with astonishing candor and honest compassion. Reflecting on lessons learned over twentyfive years and thousands of operations completed on some of the most vulnerable and precious among us, Wellons recounts with gripping detail the moments that have shaped him as a doctor, as a parent, and as the only hope for countless patients whose young lives are in his hands.
“Amid that chaos of becoming a neurosurgeon, I was drawn to the cases that involved children. I watched as the pediatric neurosurgeons moved with the parents and the children from the anxious unknown of diagnosis through the delicate surgical interventions and finally into the relief of recovery. For the child, it was simply a chance to heal and live; theirs is the most innocent view. “I hurt; now I hurt no longer.” For the parent, it was the intensity of the emotions that come with the anguish of a life-altering diagnosis in your child and the trust necessary to allow another human being to intervene. For the surgeon, it was the opportunity to fundamentally improve, or even bring back, a child who is pure potential, for whom nothing is truly determined and all possibilities exist.”
Wellons shares scenes of his early days as the son of a military pilot, the years of grueling training, and true stories of what it's like to treat the brave children he meets on the threshold of life and death. From the toddler who arrived in Wellons' operating room barely alive from a gunshot wound to the head, to the eight-year-old boy with severe nerve damage requiring repair using suture as fine as human hair, to the teenage girl dealing with the aftermath of a challenging brain tumor resection, to the mother-to-be undergoing fetal spinal cord surgery in the womb, All That Moves Us is an unforgettable portrait of the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern children’s hospital—and a meditation on the marvel of life as seen from under the white-hot lights of the operating room.
“It is not a surprise that we are all fragile. None more so than the littlest among us. The dark and unknown that we all face make us more so. But life wants to live, and I have learned that we are also extraordinarily resilient. None more so than the littlest among us. A child comes to us with a particular problem that requires intervention on the most sacred part of their being, the brain or spinal cord, those parts that make us essentially human. I most often feel that operating on them has had the effect of making me more essentially human, that as much as I have healed, I have been healed.”
About the Author:
Jay Wellons MD, MSPH holds the Cal Turner Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery and is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, and Radiology and Radiological Sciences, and is also the Vice Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. He founded SOCKS (the Surgical Outcomes Center for Kids) in 2015 and served as the Medical Director until 2022. He also served as the VUMC Section of Surgical Sciences Vice Chair of Clinical Research 2018-2022 and Department of Neurological Surgery Program Director for the Neurosurgery Residency Training Program from 2014-2018.
He received a BA in English from the University of Mississippi in 1991, his medical degree from the University of Mississippi Medical School in 1995, and completed his residency in neurologic surgery at Duke University Medical Center in 2001. This was followed by a one-year fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Alabama – Birmingham and the Children’s Hospital of Alabama. After his fellowship was complete in 2002, he remained on faculty at UAB for a total of 10 years, obtaining an MSPH during that time. He came to Vanderbilt in September of 2012.
Dr. Wellons has participated as a site investigator in two multi-institutional research networks centered on pediatric hydrocephalus and Chiari malformation surgical and patient-centered outcomes. While his past areas of interest include surgery for brain tumors, blood vessel malformations, and craniosynostosis, his current focus is on the surgical management of the Chiari Malformations, congenital neurosurgery, intrauterine neurosurgery, and lesions of the brachial plexus. This work has informed additional research endeavors evaluating health disparities, quality of life and in utero vs. post-natal surgery outcomes.
He has served on the editorial board of Journal of Neurosurgery – Pediatrics, co-hosted the AANS/CNS Section on Pediatric Neurosurgery Annual Meeting in Nashville in 2018, and currently serves as President of the American Society of Pediatric Neurosurgeons.
In addition to his scientific writing, he has been a contributor to the New York Times Sunday Review, TIME, Garden and Gun Magazine, Fresh Air: NPR, and OprahDaily.com. His book, All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and their Stories of Grace and Resilience, with publisher Penguin Random House, debuted in June of 2022. His non-scientific writing focuses specifically on his specialty of pediatric neurosurgery, but also the broader field of medicine and the profound lessons learned from the children and parents that he has cared for over the last 30 years.
Other links of interest: