There's always a competition among expectant mothers (and also their expectant obstetricians) to deliver the first baby in the new year.
Each year's firstborn gets a place in history -- name and picture in the newspaper and, nowadays, wide social media exposure. In some places, there's also a treasure trove of freebies -- formula, diapers, the works.
Dr. Paul Wendel, professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a practicing obstetrician for nearly three decades, decided he would not be involved in this year's competition: "I'll read about it the next morning, but I won't be delivering it." His motto: "Don't lose sleep -- make others lose sleep."
"You do work your number of New Year's Eves," he says, and the way it works, "about midevening, you start to check to see if there's a mom who's close. It's gamesmanship -- coaching them when to push, when to rest.
"You can cheat if it's a C-section, hold the start time. It's harder to predict when it's a vaginal birth; it's open to spontaneity. [A New Year's birth] within the first 20 to 30 minutes, if it's a vaginal delivery, it was meant to be."
That first-baby competition is really big in Dallas, where Wendel did his fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. (Parkland, Dallas' second biggest hospital, with 18,000 births a year, usually wins.)
Recently, UAMS has been losing out to one of its two Little Rock competitors. "We had a run here, first three or four years I was here," Wendel says. "Now Baptist and [CHI] St. Vincent are doing a lot more deliveries."
Part of that, he explains, is that UAMS "is top-heavy in complicated pregnancies." Hospitals around the state funnel their high-risk pregnancies there, in large part because Wendel and his colleagues are the fetal/maternal gold standard.
Wendel is starting his 23rd year at UAMS. Until fairly recently, he was one of only three fetal-maternal specialists in the state (now there are five), dealing principally with problem pregnancies, ones in which some major problem threatens the life and health of the fetus and/or the mother.
"At Parkland, they have 18 fetal/maternal doctors," he says. "Up until two years ago, there were only three of us in the whole state. So if you had a problem, there was a one in three chance I was taking care of you."
Closure in his business usually comes after the baby is born and the umbilical cord is cut. "Once we disconnect the two of them, that's where my role in fetal medicine ends," he says.
But with Wendel, it rarely ends there. His patients are "tremendously grateful. They want to thank you, do something for you. I'm overwhelmed. On Facebook, they post the birth dates of babies, tag me and thank me. You don't forget a relationship like that," he says.
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It goes even further than that. During a six-year campaign, 2007-13, 1,300 of Wendel's very grateful patients and their relatives raised $1 million to create the Paul J. Wendel Endowed Chair in Maternal-Fetal Medicine at UAMS.
"I received an offer to leave for another academic center," Wendel recalls. Some of his patients, unwilling to see him go, asked him what it would take for him to stay. "I told them, 'An endowed chair. But that's a million dollars.' They said, 'We're going to do that.'"
The 1,300 donors chipped in, some as little as $10; the biggest gift, from a foundation, was $100,000. Typically, the money for an endowed chair comes from just one or two donors of foundations.
The campaign started to lag after a while -- not for lack of will, but perhaps for lack of energy -- and Judy Adams, who owns Little Rock catering firm Catering to You, stepped up, took charge and completed the last half of the fundraising.
FORMER PATIENTS STEP UP
Her daughter Ashley was 23 weeks pregnant in 2006; her obstetrician told her the baby had not grown in three weeks and was not moving. The Adamses went for a second opinion, "and that happened to be Paul Wendel."
An ultrasound revealed good and bad news. Wendel told them, "'The good news is that I can find nothing wrong with the baby; but you have no amniotic fluid and I don't know why.' ... What endeared him to me forever and ever and ever was [his saying], 'I'm going to do everything I can do, and you'll do everything you can do. The thing you can do the best is, get your family and friends close to God and start praying.'"
Baby Noah, born at 3 pounds, 14 inches, is perfectly healthy today, says his doting grandmother. Mother and grandmother are "eternally grateful to Paul Wendel." Adams helped organize a fundraiser toward the endowed chair. "And I really think they thought, with a whole heart, that they would raise that whole million that night." They did raise $80,000.
"It just kind of dwindled from there," she says.
"It took longer, but the good side to that is that we had more [donors] than any other endowment at UAMS."
Dr. Jeanine Andersson, another grateful patient, was involved in the endowment fund and was chairman of it in its last year. Wendel delivered all four of her children, starting with twins in 2008. Three of the four were problem pregnancies.
"As a physician, I think I have kind of a unique perspective on him," says Andersson, a hand surgeon at Arkansas Specialty Orthopedics in Little Rock. "Because I know what it takes to take care of patients, but when you're dealing with unborn babies and fanatic moms-to-be, it's a much bigger deal.
"Most of his patients are worried about their unborn baby or know that there's some impending genetic problem," and Wendel's bedside manner, she adds, "just instills confidence more than anything. In your ability to get through it as a mom, but also that you're going to get taken care of once that baby's here. And he instills that in the nurses on the floor, his medical students, his residents, his proteges.
"Sometimes the technical part of what we do is the easiest part of our job, and taking care of the patient as a person is the hardest part of the job, and that's what he excels at."
HAIL FELLOW
Wendel says the endowed chair made it possible to create and finance a fellowship in maternal and fetal medicine at UAMS. "The role of endowed chair is to do something with it, perpetuate what I do," he explains. "It helps keep people in the program." Good, well-trained doctors-to-be are a hot commodity and highly sought, he adds. A fellowship makes it possible to help those students financially, to recruit new faculty and draw in research dollars and even corporate funding.
UAMS hired the first fellow, Adam Sandlin, a North Little Rock resident, an alumnus of Central Arkansas Christian and Harding University who went to med school and did his residency at UAMS.
"He's a fabulous kid; now he's gonna be the bomb," Wendel says. (And the second fellow, Magnolia native Dawn Hughes? "We hope to steal her, too," he adds.)
"I've worked either under him or beside him for nearly 10 years now," says his protege, now Dr. Sandlin. "His model and example, what he did and how he took care of patients and what he was able to do, was what inspired me to really look into the field of fetal/maternal medicine.
"Personality-wise, worldview-wise, we click. I feel very much like I've been able to walk in his footsteps. And then to come into my own a little bit and work beside him as a partner and teammate, more so than an instructor.
"What I've found so impressive about him is his ability to connect with his patients, to be able to coach them through a pregnancy and complicated times. To be on their level and speak in a way they can understand, and at the same time be very honest and blunt -- and people need that," Sandlin adds.
MEDICAL BROTHERHOOD
Wendel, the youngest of four brothers, and his wife, Kathy, who has nine siblings, have had six children together.
"We started a little bit later" than most parents, Wendel says; Kathy, an intensive care unit nurse, had early infertility problems, which her doctor attributed largely to overwork.
Their first child came when she was 31; subsequent children, when she was 33, 34, 37, 39 and 43. Of the four boys, the eldest is a fourth-year med student going into (you guessed it) OB-GYN, the second is an IT guy for an electronic medical records firm in Kansas City, the third is an engineer for Lockheed-Martin and the fourth is in a Catholic seminary north of Kansas City. The two girls include a student-athlete at Mount St. Mary Academy and the youngest is a seventh-grader at Christ the King.
Wendel didn't deliver any of them, by the way: "Too close," he says. "That close, you don't make good decisions. I was a lot more nervous than most fathers."
Wendel was a political science major as an undergrad and was looking to go into teaching or law school. After a visit to his OB-GYN brother in Dallas, he recalls, "I thought, 'This is cool.' So in my senior year in college I took a science class." Most social-science majors take Rocks for Jocks; "I took a biology class and did quite well."
At the time, a lot of medical schools were looking to broaden their range of students by adding more "humanity" in medicine. He spent four years at the University of Missouri at Columbia followed by a residency and fellowship in Dallas. At first he was considering going into family practice "or potentially pediatrics," he says, but his last third-year rotation was OB-GYN, and it was an instant match. "I delivered six babies and I thought I walked on water," he recalls.
Having reached what Wendel calls the "top of the pyramid," he still sees patients, but fewer of them, and spends a fair amount of time doing administrative tasks. He devotes much of his time to guiding expectant mothers into taking good care of themselves and their pending bundles of joy. "Prenatal care is 90 percent of obstetrics," he says. "Labor and delivery have become fairly automated -- nurses, interns, anesthetists.
"I'm seeing patients five days a week, but I'm doing it more from the top of the pyramid. I spend three days a week doing hands-on, bedside. The rest is done by APNs [Advanced Practice Nurses, including nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, certified nurse midwives and certified registered nurse anesthetists], physicians' assistants and med students."
Wendel sees his role now as more of a head coach: "Get the players to the game, it's up to them to play it." For awhile, UAMS sent students to the delivery rooms at Baptist and CHI St. Vincent, but "that had to come to an end" because, academically, it wasn't possible to properly supervise them off the campus.
Wendel, however, has recently been doing some outreach. "For the first time, as of Nov. 1, I've been going out to Baptist," he says. The goal is to make it possible for them to cope better with high-risk pregnancies -- "to take care of their own patients without having to refer them here."
He has also started working with others around the state via telemedicine, interacting face-to-face with patients but via a screen. Among the beneficiaries so far: The state's prison system, which has to deal regularly with pregnant inmates. "Transportation is no longer an issue," he says. "Now they have the knowledge, all they have to do is get them to a delivery room."
OUTSIDE THE DELIVERY ROOM
The Wendels are very much involved in their church, west Little Rock's Christ the King Catholic Church. And, "I love being at the Little Rock Athletic Club," Wendel says, mostly to socialize -- he does work out occasionally, but mostly "I talk a workout."
He has a getaway: "I bought a place, 10 years ago now, a bungalow on Greers Ferry Lake, a place to get away. It's functional -- it has air conditioning and a washer and dryer." He also keeps a boat there. "It's 67 miles away; in an hour and a half, I can be relaxing."
He has also come to the realization that he no longer needs to be on call 24/7/365. "It takes a toll on your family," he says. "For 15 years I was ever-present and watched my own family suffer. But family is just as important or more. Eventually, it takes priority over the needs of patients.
"I've learned to pull back. I don't need to be at everybody's delivery. Just get them to the right place at the right time. Hand it off to [others]. Everybody does well. It takes a lot of maturity to do that."
Wendel considers his greatest accomplishment putting into motion the means to perpetuate his legacy by building a program that will ensure he has successors.
"We don't ever want to ship our moms to another state" for treatment, he says. "We want to be able to take care of their kids' kids.
"That's the essence of what I love and do. It's what I'm most proud of."
Paul John Wendel
• DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept. 10, 1959, St. Louis
• FAMILY: Wife Kathy, six children
• FAVORITE COLOR: blue
• FAVORITE TYPE OF FOOD: Mexican
• I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT EAT anchovies.
• FAVORITE JUNK FOOD: pizza
• THE MENU FOR MY LAST MEAL: filet mignon
• GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY: My family; my daughters-in-law; my new grandson; my mother; and my dad, who is deceased. Family is everything to me.
• NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: I'd like to get back in shape and lose 10 pounds.
• IF I'VE LEARNED ONE THING IN LIFE, IT'S: Treat other people well and they'll be forever grateful.
• PEOPLE WHO KNEW ME IN HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHT I WAS a dork.
• MY PARENTS WOULD HAVE DESCRIBED ME AS a hyperactive, wild kid. My mother still can't believe I'm a physician.
• I WANT MY CHILDREN TO REMEMBER: Live a life of service. Work hard, and always be proud of the family name.
• THE BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED: The department chairman when I arrived told me that, just as all the things that turn out well in the world cannot be attributed to you, all bad outcomes in medicine aren't necessarily your fault.
• FAVORITE TV DOCTOR SHOW: Trapper John, M.D.
• WORST TV DOCTOR SHOW: E.R.
• MY PET PEEVE ABOUT SOCIETY IS that people use social media for their news source.
• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: social
High Profile on 01/01/2017