HIGH PROFILE: Dr. William Hart Benton drawn to high-stakes field of neonatal intensive care

Drawn to the high-stakes field of neonatal intensive care by a taste for adrenaline, Dr. Bill Benton pioneered treatments that avert risk and prevent stress for the tiniest preemies.

“I walked in and there’s ventilators going off and alarms and all of this crazy stuff going on and it was like I am home. This is physics, it’s chemistry. It’s life and death. It’s everything. Everything that I have been doing and that I loved, it’s all here in one place.”
(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)
“I walked in and there’s ventilators going off and alarms and all of this crazy stuff going on and it was like I am home. This is physics, it’s chemistry. It’s life and death. It’s everything. Everything that I have been doing and that I loved, it’s all here in one place.” (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)

Bill Benton grew up the son of a daredevil. Young Bill would jump into the passenger seat of his dad's Piper Cub, strap on his dad's World War II-era headset and off they would go. Landing the Cub was the biggest thrill. The tiny two-seater plane is a tail-dragger and the pilot cannot see over its nose.

Though no longer a daredevil like his father, Benton still yearns for the adrenaline rush he got in his childhood. Today, he works in a life-or-death environment as a neonatologist at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock.

During junior high school, Benton was taught how to fly by his dad, Fred G. Benton, a retired Navy pilot. "I was actually flying with my dad before I ever drove," he remembers.

"We used to fly over swamps -- no instruments, no radio, no life vests. Nothing. He was a big adrenaline junkie so I kind of became an adrenaline junkie."

In college, Benton had his first near-death experience. He and a friend decided to take the Cub on a late-night trip. About 40 miles outside Baton Rouge, the old Cub started malfunctioning.

"The lights in the cockpit start going down, and we lose alternator power. There is a procedure that you use to restart the alternator. The alternator runs all of the instruments inside the cockpit and the lights. Everything except the spark plugs that keep you in the air. ... Total loss of power.

"It's a beautiful night. The moon is up and all you can see is the lights below and the moon because the cockpit is pitch black," he says. "And we flew that thing in right on top of an airliner because you can't fly under their draft -- you have to fly on top of it. So we survived that.

"And so the next day I get a call from the Drug Enforcement Administration. 'Excuse me, sir. Are you running drugs?' 'Uh no,' I said, 'Actually not.'"

Benton's ties to Louisiana run deep. His mother, Courtney Benton, who died in 2019, was a pianist who made her first solo appearance with the Baton Rouge Symphony just days before the birth of her second child. Her obituary noted that her most challenging moment was performing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in c minor.

"After her performance, Maestro [Emil] Cooper walked to the piano, held her hands, and said 'Bravo! Bravo!,'" according to the obituary.

She appeared frequently in the Baton Rouge newspaper both for her musical skills and as a mother of six.

"My mother was a magnificent, beautiful, intelligent concert pianist," Benton says. "My mother and I had the same sense of humor and laughed our heads off."

Father Fred was a lawyer specializing in municipal bonds that financed firehouses, schools, roads, government complexes and bridges.

The fifth child, Benton grew up in Baton Rouge in a house built by his father. Fred Benton instilled in his family the philosophy that Black and white people were equal, and he spent his lifetime working for that cause.

Fred's adventures extended beyond aviation. He introduced son Bill to the Tunica Indian tribe, taking on the case for free to return the burial grounds to the Indians. Fred ultimately pushed to create a state park -- Trudeau Plantation State Park -- in Louisiana to protect the tribal artifacts.

As Benton talks about his childhood, memories pop up that he hadn't thought about in a long time. Too many to recount, but a few stand out. Fred and Bill liked to search for Indian artifacts in a swampy area near New Orleans that was filled with alligators. Fred also liked to load the family into his ski boat "which always died," but somehow their dad always got it restarted. One time, he headed straight into a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, waves washing into the boat.

"He made a big deal of being 'a man for all seasons' and that is exactly what I put on his tombstone." Fred Benton died nine years ago today.

CALLING DR. BENTON

In high school at Baton Rouge, Benton was introduced to the world of medicine by a family friend. He started tagging along with him as he worked in the emergency room of Baton Rouge General Hospital. "This kind of appealed to the adrenaline background I grew up with," he says.

"I watched them resuscitate people. I remember shooting victims and stabbing victims. I remember one guy had a knife sticking out of his chest and [the doctor] said, 'There's nothing we can do for him.' And they just wheeled him into the back, and I remember just thinking how horrible and tragic that was," he says. "We had a shootout one time between people in the emergency room. It was a real education."

He went to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge where he was interested in getting a degree in clinical research and had papers published in scientific journals with several renowned professors. He says he was a terrible pre-med student, preferring to spend all of his time in a lab rather than doing the course work.

He decided to change colleges, set his sights high and applied at Duke University, one of the top medical schools in the country. And, he says, "shockingly," he got in. He was awarded a fellowship in its department of chemistry, where he studied membranes. The research ended up showing "you don't need enzymes that have specific kinds of membrane oxidative degradation, and that was a lot of fun." He graduated from Duke with distinction and earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry.

He returned to Louisiana because its medical schools were less expensive and was accepted at LSU-Shreveport. During his pediatric rotation, he discovered the field of neonatology.

"I looked through these swinging doors into this very brightly lit, very noisy environment. It looked like there was a lot of adrenaline in there, and that was attractive to me." He had peered inside a neonatal intensive care unit.

"I walked in, and there's ventilators going off and alarms and all of this crazy stuff going on and it was like I am home," he says. "This is physics, it's chemistry. It's life and death. It's everything. Everything that I have been doing and that I loved, it's all here in one place."

He completed his internship and residency at LSU-Shreveport with an emphasis in neonatology.

Next, he did a fellowship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where he focused his research on meconium aspiration syndrome and developed a model that showed the use of surfactant therapy is an effective treatment.

CALLING ARKANSAS HOME

Benton met his future wife, Beth, at LSU-Shreveport, where she was a pediatric nurse. "It was love at first sight. She was behind the counter mixing up meds and I was out there with a group of doctors. We were making rounds, and I just looked back there and she looked underneath that med cabinet for a second and we just looked at each other. And the rest is history."

After they were married, Beth suggested moving to Little Rock -- wanting to be closer to his family in Baton Rouge and her mother in Shreveport. She also had spent some summers vacationing in Arkansas and had fond childhood memories of the Natural State.

"To someone who didn't know Bill, I would describe him as steady and calm and completely dependable," Beth says. "His greatest attribute is that he has a tremendous heart that cares so much for his patients, his co-workers, his family and his friends."

Through Pediatrix Medical Group of Arkansas, Benton works at Baptist Health in the neonatal intensive care unit -- NICU for short. There he is dealing not just with the tiniest of patients but with their worried and frazzled parents. Part of the work he did at Vanderbilt on giving antenatal steroids to expectant at-risk mothers has been put to use in Little Rock and beyond.

"It's two injections that you give the moms, and within 24 hours it protects the baby," he says. "It basically improves their survival. It reduces their lung and brain and blood pressure issues. It's just tremendous."

When he arrived at Little Rock, the procedure was considered controversial.

"The National Institutes of Health were still debating it. We had a working group getting ready to release a consensus statement. I'd already seen the impact of antenatal steroids at Vanderbilt, and it was tremendous," he says. "We are talking about 2-pound babies with basically no oxygen. It was traumatic.

"It was more than you could really do in an intensive care unit. Prevention is always better than care. Always, always, always. That was the way to prevent disasters in premature babies."

Another major change he made seems common-sense but wasn't the standard practice at the time. Then, neonatal units were full of bright lights.

"You stop and think for a second -- this is really stupid. Where is the normal neonatal intensive care unit? Well, we all know it is the normal pregnancy. What are we trying to do -- reinvent the wheel when it is right in front of us?"

At that time, Harvard and Stanford universities had just released two studies showing premature babies needed to be in a womb-like environment.

"It's dark. It's quiet. It's minimal stimulation. It's hands off -- stay away. The less you touch me and rev up my basal metabolic rate and use my calories for stress versus growth, nutrition and immune competence so I don't get an infection or brain developments or [attention deficit disorder], the better."

At Baptist, Benton worked on a $3 million renovation of the NICU with one baby per room, sliding glass doors, the babies in isolettes, no lights and the removal of the stereo system. He says the work was completed several decades ago.

At that time, the NICU nurses were hesitant because they couldn't see the babies.

"It was a legitimate concern, but I said, 'I promise if they go into the isolette and you put them in this room by themselves and you close the doors and turn the lights off, that baby's oxygen levels, heart rate and everything is going to be better.' Boom! It worked," he says.

Benton gives all of the credit to the nurses, respiratory therapists and lab staff in the NICU -- saying he wishes he could list the names of all of the caregivers he works with.

"They are the foot soldiers of medicine," he says. "So who is actually healing the patient? It's everybody, especially the people who are actually doing the work, and that would be those bedside nurses. ... They have to execute that flawlessly."

Rick Nestrud was one of two doctors who hired Benton. Nestrud, who retired in 2017 as a neonatologist, says Benton's level of energy is infectious.

"He might bring something new to the practice and the nurses will roll their eyes and they're like, 'Oh my God. Here he comes again and we're going to have to do this all different [from the way] we've been doing it before,'" Nestrud says. "But they know what he is bringing is an innovation for improved care for our patients."

Dr. Ricardo Sotomora, also a neonatologist, was the second doctor who was influential in hiring Benton. Sotomora calls Benton "obsessive" -- but in a good way.

"He's loyal to the end," Sotomora says. "If you establish a relationship with him, he will swim across the ocean for you. That is one of his best qualities."

GONE HIKING

The couple have four children. Mitchell is a third-year medical student; Nathan is a data engineer; Emily is a technical writer and the mother of four of their grandchildren; and Caroline is the mother of three grandchildren. Thankfully, none of their clan needed to be in a NICU.

In a group email, his children described their father as "loving; caring; amazing teacher about life and career; great role model; encouraging; involved; fun; great memory-maker and a great provider."

Benton is not a daredevil father like his dad. Instead he takes his family on hikes and other outdoor outings.

"I had enough near-death experiences as a kid. But we took them out West a lot. We took them white-water rafting as a family. We had some great vacations, but nothing as extreme as my dad was or I was."

And his friends say he places all of his energy into what matters most to him.

"He's a character and he has all sides to his personality. But he has the biggest heart of anybody, and he brings that to the patients and he brings that to the staff. ... He may have some rough edges to his personality, but he always brings it with heart and always brings it with empathy and always brings it with a strive for excellence," Nestrud says. "Everybody loves him."

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