When Dr. Andy Connaughton founded Conway Children’s Clinic in 1987, he was on call 364 days that first year — taking board exams on his one day off.
“I figured I could last three years taking calls,” he said.
After 27 years in practice, his 2 a.m. calls from worried mothers about their babies’ rashes and fevers ended earlier this month when he retired.
“I really said I was going to retire when a mom I took care of [as a child], when she had a baby, but that was six or seven years ago,” he said. “I’ve got a couple hundred families I take care of second generations.”
One of those second-generation families is Zack Dayer, 30, of Conway. He grew up going to Connaughton, as did all his cousins, Dayer said.
“I just remember, I kind of liked going to the doctor just to see him,” Dayer said. “I thought he was kind of cool. He was just always really nice; he was always just great with us. I saw him until I was, gosh, 22. Well, at least 18 or 19.”
Dayer and his wife, Lindsey, took their daughter, Charlee, now 20 months old, to Connaughton.
“When she was born, she had aspirated a little amniotic fluid and had a low-resting heart rate,” he said. “It ended up being no big deal, but there wasn’t anyone else I was willing to take her to. We hooked up with Dr. Connaughton again. He’s just been great with our little girl, Charlee. He gave us his personal home phone number. He said, ‘Don’t go to those after-hour clinics; call me.’
“He’s just been phenomenal.”
Dayer said he and his wife are sad that Connaughton is retiring.
“We were heartbroken when we found out, but we understand,” Dayer said.
Connaughton, 57, is retiring to spend time on another of his passions, his farm in Holland (in Faulkner County), where he has horses and cattle.
He and his wife, Cathie, purchased the farm in 2005. Connaughton said their younger daughter, Kerri, likes horses, “so it was really driven by Kerri.”
An outdoorsy guy, Connaughton grew up in Little Rock, one of four kids. His parents were both graduates of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. His dad was an IRS agent; his mother was a county extension agent, then a homemaker.
“I was a goofball,” Connaughton said.
The family lived next door to Mount St. Mary’s Academy, and he and his siblings would ride their bikes five or six miles to Allsopp Park.
“It was a different world. Our parents would go and let us do whatever as long as we came in at 6 for dinner,” he said.
Connaughton, who attended Catholic High School in Little Rock, said he didn’t play sports, but he started working at a grocery store for $2.30 an hour.
“I thought I was making big bucks,” he said.
He applied “at the last minute” to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he went with the goal of becoming a forest ranger.
“Life is really a matter of being in the right spot at the right time,” he said.
Connaughton said he and about 12 former Catholic High School students became “really tight,” and they hung out with friends who were attending the University of Central Arkansas.
One of his friends, whose father was a doctor, planned to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I was making lots better grades than him,” Connaughton said.
It made him start thinking. Connaughton said he also looked up to Dr. John Stotts in Little Rock, a family-practice doctor, so Connaughton decided to try medicine.
Connaughton said he remembers sitting in the porch swing with his dad at his parents’ home and telling him he was going to become a doctor.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you shoot for the moon?’” Connaughton said.
After college, Connaughton applied to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and was placed on the alternate list for admission.
In the meantime, he went to medical-technician school at UAMS, and after about 11 months of the 15-month program, he was accepted to medical school there.
“My mentality is, if you want something bad enough, you don’t give up on that dream,” he said. “My dad instilled that in me.”
Connaughton said he always liked kids, liked to tease them, and he decided on pediatrics.
“Med school is probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s one of those things where you almost have to live and breathe it.”
He did his residency at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where he worked 95 to 100 hours some weeks.
“I was real fortunate to get in pediatrics at Children’s. It has an excellent program,” he said.
Connaughton and his wife, who was a medical technician at the time, had their first daughter, Sara, the first year of his residency. Kerri was born the third year.
He was making $13,000 a year for those 100 hours a week, so he moonlighted.
Connaughton said there “are about 10 people I really respect,” and one was Dr. Bob Fiser, who was in charge of interns at Arkansas Children’s Hospital at the time and has since died.
If a resident wanted to moonlight, Fiser had to give permission.
“He’s sitting behind his desk, and he said, ‘I hear you want to moonlight.’”
Connaughton told him yes, that he needed the extra money.
“He said, ‘I want to tell you one thing …’” That’s when Connaughton said he thought Fiser might lecture him about not letting his work slip.
“He said, ‘You’ve got a new baby; you’ve got a wife. Make sure you spend time with your kids and wife. That part you can never get back.’
“My mouth just fell open. He never said a word about residency,” Connaughton said.
“We sometimes put our own goals ahead of everything else, and we shouldn’t.”
Connaughton started moonlighting at the Conway Human Development Center, which led him to pick Conway as the place to open his practice.
Connaughton was considering Conway or Russellville, but as he drove through Conway, “I’d see kid after kid after kid running around playing,” Connaughton said.
Instead of joining a group of doctors in Little Rock, he opened his practice in 1987 on College Avenue.
“I’ve always been a little bit of an independent person,” he said.
He was the only pediatrician in town at the time.
“Three different pediatricians before me pretty much got overworked,” he said. “There wasn’t a pediatrician in probably three years before me.”
After an exhausting year of being a one-man show, he hired Dr. Steve McNabb, who was followed by several other partners.
“I don’t know how Cathie tolerated me; I really don’t,” Connaughton said of his solo year taking calls.
Connaughton did a little math out loud as he sat in an overstuffed chair in his living room, barefoot and in shorts, with Kova, his faithful old Labrador, near him.
Connaughton figures he’s seen 243,000 patients during his 27-year career.
“The reason I survived is I had good partners — no ifs, ands or buts,” he said.
“Without good, intelligent backup, I wouldn’t have survived. My goal was to be able to raise my family and at least be able to provide for them.”
He served as a softball coach for Kerri, now 27, and Sara, now 29, and would take them to school in the mornings when Cathie went to work. They were a team, he said, adding that his wife served as a Girl Scout troop leader.
Meanwhile, the clinic thrived.
It was on the cutting edge from the beginning, Connaughton said.
“We were probably one of the first clinics in Conway to go to electronic health care records. We were probably one of the first in Conway to have electronic billing, computer-based billing. I started off my first year, your office manager would mail out bills, handwritten stuff.
“In 2001 or 2002, we went to electronic health records,” he said.
That was good and bad, he said.
“Electronic health records make it a little less personal. I hate to say this, but I just became not as satisfied being a physician,” Connaughton said.
Technology changed, and so did the diseases he treated, thanks mostly to vaccines.
“You hardly ever see chickenpox,” he said. “You still see whooping cough; you don’t see measles.”
“When I was a resident, we had Type B haemophilus influenzae,” a bacteria that can cause a variety of diseases, including meningitis.
“I had a patient who died on me in Russellville. I’ll never forget the mom grabbing me by the arms, ‘Save my baby!’”
Connaughton said there was nothing he could do then.
A vaccine for the disease came late in his internship, he said, but it was new, and “people were scared of it.”
“Now, we don’t ever hear of such cases,” he said.
Connaughton gave credit to Conway’s obstetricians, too.
“Pediatricians in Conway have always been blessed by the obstetricians. We are fortunate to have the best OBs in the state. They have been instrumental in pediatric/neonatal care, making our job easier,” he said.
Conway Children’s Clinic opened the Greenbrier Children’s Clinic, and a couple of years ago, it became the state’s first exclusively pediatric rural health clinic that was started by a primary-care physician, he said.
“I thought I could go to 60, 70 years old before I retired. Medicine in Conway has changed a lot,” he said.
Connaughton said he sees the future in medicine as driven by technology — using computers to see patients.
“They’re already talking about medicine in Skype, where you pull them up on the computer, and they interview you. I told my partners, ‘We need to get in that — that’s where medicine is going.’ You might even look at a throat through your TV,” he said.
He said he thinks it’s a good idea. “The question is, are doctors flexible enough to embrace that?”
“It’s inevitable. … Younger residents will probably take that in stride, as tech-savvy as they are,” he said.
It’s a new generation, and his daughter Sara is among them. She’s an emergency-medicine resident at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
But, it’s the one-on-one interaction and the relationships that were rewarding to Connaughton all those years.
“As a pediatrician, the most pleasure was holding a kid in my arms and seeing him laugh or smile, and having that trust of a parent,” he said.
“I really want to thank them. That sense of trust just makes a person feel good. When you can look them in the eyes and see that sense of trust, it’s a weird feeling. It’s a lot of responsibility. I wish I could do it all my life,” he said.
Dr. David Reese, a Conway dentist, was surprised to hear Connaughton was retiring.
Reese and his wife, Nancy, took their daughters, Elizabeth and Nicole, to Connaughton.
“He was real personal and would take time to talk to you and had a good sense of humor and was great with the kids,” Reese said.
Connaughton said he had a laid-back approach to being a pediatrician.
“I’ve been the one who has always tried to get the kid to smile or laugh,” Connaughton said. “I’ve never worn a lab coat.”
Any patient of Connaughton’s will remember the bird whistle. When he checked a child’s ears, he would do a little whistle and ask: “Do you hear that bird?”
“You get a smile on their face, and all of a sudden, you’re not such an evil guy,” he said.
As word has spread of his retirement, he’s received letters and notes from his patients, thanking him.
“It’s a blessing and makes me feel good about it,” he said of his career. “Sometimes you want to just stop and smell the roses more.”
He said he looks forward to spending more time with his wife on their farm.
“We can build a heck of a straight fence,” he said.
“One of the things I’ve learned as a pediatrician, or a doc, is that lots of docs are book smart. We become nerds. Medical literature, we’re pretty affluent at that. You get outside of that, we’re pretty dang stupid. I’ve learned how to fix things — and I’m probably as proud of that as finding out a kid has an ear infection.
“I wish I could say goodbye to my patients, parents individually. I know that it is impossible, but I would like to ask their forgiveness and understanding. It truly was a privilege to be involved in the care of their most precious possession.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.