THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606230041
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 140 lines
Some might call it a mid-life crisis. Or a retreat to a simpler life. Or even a waste of exemplary medical talent.
Pediatric cardiologist David H. Johnson calls it a quest.
Last week, he ended 19 years at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters - years in which he helped start the hospital's pediatric heart-transplant program - to treat colds and ear infections as a children's doctor in rural North Carolina.
The 55-year-old doctor packed up the children's drawings and photographs that graced his office. Cleaned off the round table that served as his desk. And carted away the battered wooden chair, ``which perfectly fits my bottom,'' for his new office in Burnsville, N.C.
There, at the base of Mt. Mitchell, he will join a one-person pediatric practice housed in an old general store.
At a time when most doctors his age might be contemplating retirement, Johnson is embarking upon a new life.
But then, say those who know him, Johnson is not ``most doctors.''
With his bow tie and slightly rumpled appearance, David Johnson has the cozy look of a teddy bear.
Oversized glasses lend his eyes a soft, quizzical look. A slight stoop makes him appear always ready to listen to a child's heart.
As a cardiologist, Johnson was not the doctor cutting open children's chests and slipping out their diseased hearts. He was the doctor keeping those children alive before and after the surgery.
``He's one of the reasons we've had the success we've had,'' said cardiac surgeon Glenn R. Barnhart, who performs many of the hospital's heart transplants.
Johnson is a modest man, one who is extremely uncomfortable with the attention his leave-taking has drawn in the community.
``I was in the right place at the right time,'' he says. ``I don't have any special skills. I was just given an opportunity to do things.''
He became a pediatrician because he liked children.
He became a cardiologist because the logic of the speciality - with its emphasis on hydraulics and physics - intrigued him.
But he is becoming a rural pediatrician because he had an epiphany.
It began two years ago, when he signed on as CHKD's medical director. His role was to help the medical staff improve the way it practiced medicine in today's managed care environment. Almost from the beginning, he said, he realized he'd made a mistake.
Six months after he started, he attended a seminar about managing medicine as a business. There, he saw hundreds of bright young doctors who were excited about what they were learning.
He wasn't.
He realized then how much he missed working with patients and their families.
``What I wanted to do was go on a quest to find myself in the only way I knew how to do well,'' he says. ``In the service of others.''
If he could have done anything, he says, he would have returned to school for a degree in public health, specializing in tropical medicine. Then become a medical missionary in a third-world country. But his wife was ill, so he chose another path.
He never considered staying at Children's Hospital. ``This organization doesn't need me. There are plenty of good cardiologists here, plenty of good leadership.''
But a small town in western North Carolina did need another pediatrician.
In Johnson's day, doctors were trained to hide their feelings, he says.
It's a lesson, say his colleagues and patients, that Johnson must have flunked.
For the word that arises again and again when people talk about him is ``caring.''
How caring?
He used to make house calls. Give families his home phone number. Schedule weekend appointments so he could spend more time with frightened children and their parents. Send youngsters down to the gift shop and tell them to pick out anything they wanted.
``I don't even have enough superlatives in my vocabulary to talk about him,'' says Nancy Haga of Portsmouth. Johnson has treated her 12-year-old daughter since birth.
Haga once sent Johnson's wife flowers. ``I wanted to thank her for giving him to us,'' she explains.
Everyone who knows him has a story.
Cardiac surgeon Barnhart remembers most vividly the hours and hours Johnson spent sitting at the bedside of transplant patients after the surgery. Or the times he arrived at the hospital before dawn to check on a child.
Cardiology nurse coordinator Susan Alia credits Johnson with teaching her that there was more to surgical nursing than just ministering to the patient. Caring for the family, he showed her through his actions, was just as important.
``Not only does he become your physician,'' Alia says of her colleague and mentor, ``he becomes your friend. He doesn't want families to feel there's anything they need to fear that he doesn't fear for them.''
Mark and Suzanne Kobelja's son, Collin, was the hospital's first heart-transplant patient in 1990.
The Kobeljas met Johnson the day after their son was born with congenital heart defects, long before Collin's transplant at 17 months.
They knew they were dealing with a special man when Johnson finished examining Collin that first day, looked into Suzanne's eyes and asked, ``How are you doing?''
``He realized that she had just had a baby, had gotten in the car and come over here from Chesapeake and that it was very tough for her to understand what was going on,'' Mark remembers.
Thus began a relationship that transcended the professional and became a friendship. It contributed in no small way to Mark Kobelja's own decision to attend medical school and become a surgeon.
So great was the couple's trust in Johnson that when the time came to decide where Collin would receive his transplant - either at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California, which had done 62 operations, or at Children's Hospital, which had performed none - the Kobeljas told him: `` `We prefer to stay here, but we defer to your judgment.' ''
``He was kind of taken aback by that,'' Mark remembers.
Collin Kobelja's heart transplant in 1990 remains the most profound experience of his life, Johnson says, exceeding even the day he received his medical degree.
Johnson particularly remembers the press conference held the day after the surgery. ``What stands with me for my whole life is that those parents gave over to us their child to do this procedure. And they did it enthusiastically and confidently.''
Since then, the hospital has performed 19 other heart transplants. Fourteen children, including Collin, have survived, which gives the hospital a two-year survival rate comparable to the international average of 70 percent.
Johnson's departure will leave a void in the hospital, say his colleagues. Not only in the practice of medicine, but in that other speciality of Johnson's: his penchant for practical jokes.
Who else is going to call a doctor and, posing as someone from the state medical board, tell him his medical license has expired? Or dress up as a woman? Or lead his old friend, Dr. Jorge Montes, to believe that a severely burned child was coming into the hospital, then appear at the emergency room wrapped in bandages?
To his credit, however, Johnson took as good as he gave. Like the time the medical residents stole his car. Took him two days to find it in a distant parking lot.
The week before he left Children's Hospital, in his classic, low-key style, Johnson was planning another top-secret practical joke. This one, he promised, won't come off until he's already crossed the border.
So for those who think David Johnson is in the throes of a mid-life crisis, know this: There is still a lot of the kid left in him. It's just moving to North Carolina. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by HUY NGUYEN, The Virginian-Pilot
What I wanted to do was go on a quest to find myself in the only way
I knew how to do well. In the service of others.'' - Dr. David H.
Johnson. by CNB