Rush University Children's Hospital

So I'm in that neighborhood in a hospital, and I could see in my patients' bodies what I could see out the windows in a neighborhood, a correlation.

So I got recruited to come to Rush University Medical Center, which is an academic health center in Chicago, to be the first chief medical officer.

My job was to Make Rush top in quality, which after where I'd been for 30 years, didn't seem such a difficult thing.

But I realized my colleagues had no idea what was going on right outside the door because they had already been in these sort of hermetically sealed institutions.

I think being a smart surgeon, having a good rapport with your anesthesia colleagues is and being someone who thinks about how can I manipulate your body's inflammatory pathway on the way in so it makes it easier for you on the way out is what really makes the difference.

Today, I'm joined by Dr. Craig Delavalle, Endowed Professor of Orthopedic Surgery and Chief of Adult Reconstructive Services from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

He's a past president of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons and current president of the Knee Society, a leading researcher and has performed over 16,000 hip and knee replacements.

Today, we're talking about what really matters when it comes to getting a successful joint replacement.

That's great.

So, Dr. Della Valle, can you just let folks know how they can find you and any projects that you're working on now that you're excited about?

So I'm at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

I'm part of Midwest Orthopedics at Rush.

It's about good boundaries, healthy communication skills, all kinds of mental health tools.

And once I was able to feel my feelings and really heal a lot of trauma, And I was in graduate school, my husband and I had met, and I had to learn to study metaphysics because I started to have prophetic dreams about a patient of mine at Rush Medical Center in Chicago, which is where Chicago Med, the TV show, is filmed.

That's where I had my clinical internship.

And the prophetic dreams were very frightening because they were so real down to the color, the collar that the person had on.

But the bottom left corner is the one where I just had to get much more.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and I worked for a long time on the west side at Rush between University of Chicago, 26 years, Rush for nine years.

That's a long time to be in inner city, doing inner city medicine.

But it's nothing like Kentucky.

Feel good Friday.

Oh, check out the babies, the Halloween cuteness babies in the NICU at Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora and Rush University Medical Center celebrating their very first spooky season.

Nurses and families help make these adorable costumes and they're quite a bit of Disney magic up in there.

There are babies dressed as princesses, Buzz Lightyear, Dumbo and even our very own bosses.

Fascinating kind of couple of weeks in terms of what we're seeing um in the m a space and maybe just to round us off scott just to kind of finish up one last story uh close to home i think um in the chicagoland area we also saw one big big merger in the works and that's readers will be aware that rush university system for health here in chicago plans to merge with endeavor health so huge huge deal two big fantastic uh systems in their own right here in the chicagoland area And this deal, again, just recently announced last week, Endeavor plans to fund a $1 billion investment as part of this deal.

There's $500 million going into academics, a research mission, very, very tech forward kind of systems and very, very fantastic brands, fantastic reputations.

When that deal is finalized, the combined system would operate under the Rush brand, given Russia's strong national reputation, its position as a really leading academic institution.

And just to give readers a sense of that size and scale, that combined system will be 12 hospitals, around 400 or so care sites, 46,000 employees, serving about 2 million patients in Illinois.

and Northwest Indiana.

Across most of the country, as daylight saving time ends, it's a change that could impact your health.

Dr. James Wyatt, a sleep disorder specialist at Rush University Medical Center, says the change messes with the body's natural circadian rhythms.

He says when those rhythms get interrupted, our bodies have a stress response.

He says the fall time change actually has less of a negative impact compared to spring because we gain an hour in the fall, and that could mean an extra hour of sleep that most people could use.