Jousting with Death relates the many interesting experiences required to become an internationally recognized heart surgeon researcher. Just to become certified as such takes fourteen very busy years. Then in training, as afterward in practice, life can be fully lived and not just experienced. For an appropriate mindset, my hobbies were skydiving and cave diving. Old New Orleans, a tour in the military, and professorships at Tulane and Baylor College of Medicine, which were the places modern heart surgery originated, were filled with phenomenal happenings, which are described in detail. Overall, my four decades of medical practice earned seventy awards and recognitions.