Charles Lowry Barnes

LITTLE ROCK — Lowry Barnes felt fortunate to have been part of a team that gave about 45 Peruvians new chances for normal lives. Seeing those same patients a year later left him almost without words.

In 2007, he went on his first mission with Operation Walk, a private, nonprofit volunteer medical services organization that provides free surgeries for patients, mostly in developing countries where there is little access to treatment for arthritis or other debilitating bone and joint conditions.

He had the opportunity to return to Peru with Operation Walk in October 2008. He found a group of patients waiting to say thanks.

“Women get developmental displacement of the hip more often. It’s a common problem for Peruvians and so we took care of many young patients with significant leg length inequalities - one leg being significantly shorter than the other that we were able to lengthen and get them walking normally again,” he says. “One lady came in and danced for us, and the first year one lady sang the national Peruvian song for Thanksgiving for national television while we were there as a thank-you for her hip.”

On that second trip, he operated on a woman whose hips were fused.

“For years she couldn’t even go to the bathroom. She couldn’t sit. I took down both of her fused hips and did total hip replacements at the same surgery. She walked the next day, sat for the first time in years and it was a total life-changing experience for her and for the team, who were clapping as she took steps.”

Barnes has gone on two other missions with teams from other parts of the country.

“I have been with the group from Los Angeles to Peru, the group from Maryland to Peru, the group from Boston to the Dominican Republic and the group from Maryland to India.”

In December, he participated in his first Operation Walk Arkansas.

“In a very short amount of time we put together what ended up being a great program. I think we did more total joints than any other site in the country that participated. We had some great leadership with St. Vincent,” he says.

St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center employees gave almost $40,000 for Operation Walk Arkansas. Along with other money contributed by the hospital, the project resulted in 13 surgeries for 12 patients.

Gina Seabaugh, administrator of physician relations at St. Vincent, credits Barnes with not only bringing Operation Walk to Arkansas but being instrumental in starting the Orthopaedic Teaching Center, which allows St. Vincent to broadcast surgical procedures from the operating room to the auditorium, and creating the Joint Academy Program, which educates patients about what to expect throughout surgery and recovery.

Barnes learned about Operation Walk as one of four people chosen for the John N. Insall Traveling Fellowship in 2006. He met surgeons who participated in Operation Walk at 10 different medical centers. In Los Angeles, he met Larry Dorr, the orthopedic surgeon who started Operation Walk and who invited Barnes to participate.

Marty Bushmiaer, the advanced practice nurse who has worked alongside Barnes in operating rooms for 18 years, completing more than 700 total joint operations last year alone, has been on all but one of the missions with him.

“He’s a perfectionist and he’s very intense and wants everything done his way, which he considers the right way,” she says. “He wants his patients to get the best, always. He’s very demanding and he’s hard to work for and he doesn’t take excuses, so that kind of thing I deal with every day. If you’re a patient, you want a doctor like that. Iwouldn’t want to work anywhere else.”

On missions, she explains, he makes do with what’s available.

“We were doing someone’s hip and it was the last day of the mission and we only had certain sizes of prostheses and we needed a different size and we didn’t have a different size that we needed, so he had to cut a little more bone and fashioned it so that we could use the size that we had,” she says. “I don’t think a lot of surgeons would have been able to do that so that we could give that person the hip that we had told her we would give her when we got there.”

PLAYING DOCTOR

Barnes was just 6 when he decided he wanted to be a doctor.

There were no doctors in his family - he was, in fact, the first on either side of the family to go to college.

His father, Charles Barnes, worked in newspaper advertising; his mother, Reese Barnes, stayed home with him and his younger sister until they were in junior high and then got a job in a gift shop. He was born in Meridian, Miss., and the family moved around that state because of his father’s career before settling in Pine Bluff when Barnes was in fifth grade.

“My father was a real Good Samaritan-type with no medical training. He had some basic life support training, just from days as a lifeguard, but if there was a car wreck or something we always stopped and helped,” he says. “I was just always intrigued by medicine.”

Barnes had a paper route when he was 11 and a parttime job as a checker in a grocery store when he was 14. He was 16 when he got a job in the hospital in Pine Bluff, first as a pharmacy tech, then as an orderly. His first foray into an operating room happened when he was a high school student.

“I went to a general surgery and saw Dr. Clarence Rittelmeyer do a gallbladder surgery,” he says. “So I watched the first operation in an unscrubbed fashion and he enjoyed telling the story later that he asked afterward, ‘So, how’d that go? What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, that was great ... but when do I get to touch something?’ The next case I got to scrub in and I couldn’t do anything except kind of touch things, but I was very excited.”

A year later, as an orderly on the orthopedic floor, Barnes was asked to prepare a patient for hip surgery.

“I nicked him several times on the front of his leg. Banks Blackwell was his orthopedic surgeon, and Dr. Blackwell was very much a stickler for things being done the right way. I went out and told the head nurse what had happened and she came in and looked and she said, ‘Boy, Dr. Blackwell’s going to kill you,’” Barnes says. “I was supposed to finish my shift at 11 that night and I stayed around the hospital for him to round the next morning because I figured it would be best for me to tell him instead of somebody else.”

He was surprised that Blackwell smiled when he met him in the hall, thanked him for his honesty and joked that Barnes had started his incision for him.

“He said, ‘You’ll have to come to the operating room with me then.’ He took me to the operating room and we quickly became friends, and friends with his family, and he was very much my mentor from then on. If I was in Pine Bluff I was with him at the hospital or the office or doing something,” Barnes says. “I ended up doing many surgeries with him. One winter break I was home and there was a horrible ice storm in Pine Bluff and we did lots of hip fractures and wrist fractures together. I was just a college student, but I was in there helping him and was just very, very fortunate.”

Blackwell paid for Barnes’ medical school expenses, along with those of other southern Arkansas students,asking in return only that Barnes not tell anyone about it and that Barnes someday do the same for someone else.

“For somebody from very humble lower middle class it was a significant deal to have someone pay for my medical school education. I didn’t tellanyone about it until after his death, and then I have been fortunate enough to be able to help others with their medical education as well, all based upon the generosity of this man and his introducing me to orthopedics.”

THE HOGS CALLING

Barnes had a four-year scholarship to a small liberal arts college, donated by someone in Stuttgart because of his interest in pre-medical studies. The summer before college was to begin, though, he pledged the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and the rush chairman convinced him to enroll.

“When he asked me to join the fraternity, I said, ‘Well, you know, I can’t do it,’” he says. “‘I’ve got a scholarship elsewhere, we don’t have the money for me to go to college and do fraternity life - that’s something for rich kids. ...’ He came and gotme, took me to Rison where he’s from to show me that his family didn’t have lots of money either. Then he had dinner at my house that nightand promised my parents - my mom especially - that if I’d go to Fayetteville he would see to it that I made a 4.0 point my first year in college, like he had any control over that.”

Dr. Al Alexander, a Little Rock radiologist, was Barnes’ fraternity brother.

“A lot of people look at him and they see a very ambitious and competitive person. Knowing him all these years, I can say he’s probably one of the most loyal and caring people that I know,” Alexander says. “He really had a close relationship with his parents. We would go out in college and do what all college students do on Saturday nights and I would be sleeping in on Sunday mornings but Lowry would get up and go to church and then call his mother afterward just to talk to her. He was one of the only ones I knew who did that.”

Alexander is impressed by Barnes’ devotion to his family.

Barnes met his wife, Tanya, when he was a junior medical student and she was doing a dietetic internship at what was then University Hospital. They’ve been married for 26 years.

Tanya Barnes and their oldest daughter, Emily, were at St. Vincent for Operation Walk Arkansas.

“That was the first time I’d ever been in the operating room with him and it was really neat to watch him and how happy he was,” she says. “He had three rooms going at one time because he would go do this operation and then someone else would close for him and he would go do this other operation. I could tell after lunch that people were getting tired, but not Lowry.He kept getting more and more energized. It was like he was in his element and as the day went on he would get more excited.”

Barnes works hard designing implants, doing research and operating, but he is very much a family man, she says, much like his father, who coached the sports he played as a child.

Barnes’ father died in 2000. Barnes flew to Dothan, Ala., upon the news that his father had had a heart attack. Initially the cardiologist doing his father’s cardiac catheterization told him his father had a blood clot in his leg but that all would be well.

“He called me back 15 minutes later and he said, ‘Your dad is now having blood clotting everywhere, he’s screaming in pain and I don’t know what’s happening,’” he says. “I went down there and I was with him while he was going through this. He had a horrible complication known as cholesterol emboli where plaque from the aorta throw off these little clots.”

His father had only about 18 hours to live.

After his father’s death, Barnes moved his mother from Troy, Ala., to Little Rock. She was diagnosed with ALS - Lou Gehrig’s disease - in 2006.

“My kids and the rest of us learned so much from her. We saw her every day for the next few years,” he says. “The life expectancy then was 18 months and she lived for almost four years with it and she couldn’t speak after a year or so, but she had this keyboard that she would type into and it would speak for her. She couldn’t eat so she had a feeding tube, but two Christmases before her death - she couldn’t speak and couldn’t eat but she still had a Christmas party for her Sunday School class and made all the food for it herself. She was an incredible lady.”

His loss made family an even bigger priority.

Barnes has long scheduled work around his children’s extracurricular activities. He bought a duck hunt at a Boy Scout auction when his now 19-year-old son, Chase, was 6, and they both enjoyed it so much that within weeks they had a Labrador retriever and various other duck-huntingparaphernalia. Daughters Emily and 13-year-old Sally have gone with them on occasion, and the family has had Thanksgiving dinner at the duck club, too.

Every Friday and Saturday night, they all sit down as a family for dinner.

“As my kids got older, in high school, they might go out later but invariably they would rather go to dinner with us than go out so we were very lucky,” he says.

HARVARD MAN

After finishing at the University of Arkansas, Barnes went to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, graduating with honors in 1986, and did his residency in orthopedic surgery at UAMS. He had fellowships in total joint replacement and arthritis surgery from Harvard Medical School and from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, both in Boston, and he studied atthe Inselspital in Bern, Switzerland.

“The highlight of one of the St. Vincent ads is saying ‘Lowry Barnes - Harvard,’” he says. “A bunch of that is because of the Harvard mystique. But truly I’m an Arkansas boy. I consider Pine Bluff my home. My parents had moved from Pine Bluff before they died, but I still consider that my home and I had a great life there, and while Pine Bluff has had its challenges over the years, it was a great place to grow up.”

He’s willing to venture far from home to help where he can, and he recognizes that there are needs in Arkansas as well.

“In Peru, the need was so great that the group there had given us these patients toprescreen, but others knew about the program and there were 200 people there hoping someone would get canceled and that they might get moved into the spot. You see how much still needs to be done, and it’s hard to see those patients who can’t get what they need,” he says.

“That being said, this year’s program, to be able to perform these surgeries for Arkansans was a tremendously rewarding experience. I certainly believe charity should start at home and now we have a program to do so. St. Vincent just jumped right on board. They wanted to participate, they wanted to be leaders and they have been incredible. We already have patients calling the hospital [asking] how do they get involved as a patient for next year’s program.”SELF PORTRAIT Lowry Barnes

DATE, PLACE OF BIRTH April 26, 1960, Meridian, Miss.

BEING ABLE TO HELP SOMEONE GAIN THEIR MOBILITY IS A Very rewarding gift.

IN HIGH SCHOOL I WAS Coming out of my shyness.

THE MOST EXCITING THING I’VE EVER DONE IS Operate independently, especially the first time.

WHEN I WANT TO RELAX I Stretch out on the couch and watch ESPN or play tennis.

TRAVELING IS MOST ENJOYABLE With friends and family.

I KNEW I WAS A GROWNUP WHEN My dad died.

MY FAMILY THINKS I’M Demanding.

I WAS SURE I WANTED TO BE A DOCTOR From the time I was 6 but had it reinforced in high school by going into the operating room.

THE LAST BOOK I READ AND LIKED WAS Steve Jobs’ biography and it was outstanding. What an entrepreneur.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PLACE St. Vincent operating rooms 21 and 26 - the two rooms I always operate in.

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GOT WAS From my dad: Do what you love and love what you do, and work hard doing it.

TO MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY I WOULD INVITE Witt Stephens Sr., Jack Stephens and Sam Walton.

I would want them to talk about their influence on developing Arkansas as it is now. Also, Bill Clinton to moderate the discussion, and Ronald Reagan, who could talk about what he did to make America strong again. And I’d want my mom to cook the meal.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Driven.