I have spent most of my 40-year professional life on the campus of the University of Kansas Medical Center, but it was not until February 7, 2006, that I discovered how splendidly this medical complex functions.

I fell on the stairs leading from the second to the first floor of the A.R. Dykes Library of the Health Sciences, diving headfirst into a brick wall. I awoke in the Intensive Care Unit with tubes protruding from my face and limited movement of my extremities.

I learned later that shortly after I fell in the library, five individuals rushed to assist an immobile man wearing a heavy winter coat, with no visible identification, lying with his twisted head face down and turning deep blue. They did what they had to do – perfectly – and I owe my life to these heroes, this staggering array of emergency talent that came together on that chilly afternoon in the library: surgery residents who initiated CPR, nursing students and a librarian with EMT experience.

This astonishing medical center draws unimaginable strength from the rich diversity of cultures and scientific and medical disciplines. Within 10 minutes, I was on a gurney headed for the emergency room with a pulse of 70 and pink digits. I will be forever grateful that I fell where I did and received the care I did.

Part of my job as a physician and scientist is to try to make things better in my division and my institution. I am so very proud of the gains this medical center has made over the last 40 years.

But this experience gave me an opportunity to see that we have the potential for greatness. The new initiatives to enhance the research and clinical environments on campus are steps in the right direction, and as the area’s premier academic medical institution, we must also face up to our leadership responsibility in the greater Kansas City community.

I applaud the strategies that are being considered to erase the state line in order to increase the critical mass of physicians and scientists working together. If this area’s medical communities can find mutually beneficial ways to discover new knowledge together, one day citizens of the world seeking medical care and knowledge will fly to Kansas City, not over us.

I salute the men and women of the University of Kansas Medical Center. +

Jared J. Grantham, MD, is the Harry Statland Professor of Nephrology at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He lives in Leawood, Kansas.