Hi there, Shankar here. Today's episode is the last one in our series called You 2.0.

If you haven't heard the other episodes, please take a listen.

This one comes from our archives. It's about a tool that humans have used for hundreds

of years to avoid a common mistake.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthu. All of us have days when despite our best

efforts, everything just goes wrong. Sometimes terribly wrong.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brighamon Women's Hospital in Boston. He's also a writer.

You might have read his work in the New Yorker or in Slate. A few years ago, Atul was at work,

operating on a patient he refers to as Mr. Hagueman.

I was taking out a tumor of the adrenal gland laparoscopically.

He'd performed this procedure dozens of times before, but this time was particularly tricky.

Mr. Hagueman's tumor was behind his liver, nestled tightly against an important blood vessel.

The main blood vessel returning the blood of the body to the heart.

It's known as the Vena Kiva. Atul began the surgery and everything was going smoothly.

He was almost done detaching the tumor when all of a sudden he nicked the blood vessel.

I ended up creating a hole in the Vena Kiva, which meant that he then pretty quickly lost

his entire blood volume into his abdomen, complete blackout on the screen and utter chaos.

Atul took the man's heart in his hand and began compressing it to keep blood flowing

to his brain.

I mean, he lost basically 10 times his body volume in blood, but we were able to give him

enough blood to keep his circulation going. He had a cardiac arrest twice.

We were finally able to repair the hole in the Vena Kiva, get the tumor out and have

...