Love and Medicine

St. Luke’s University Health Network

St. Luke’s attracts some of the best and brightest minds to train and work in its award-winning health network in the time-honored mission of caring for the ill and injured. And sometimes love blooms there.

Drs. Erin and Chuck Bendas discovered their special connection on Thanksgiving Day, 2010. Both residents-in-training, they helped to resuscitate a desperately ill patient in the ICU. As Chuck took charge of the emergency, Cupid’s arrow landed. “I was in awe of him,” Erin recalls, although both felt an earlier mutual attraction.

Erin had arrived in Bethlehem after medical school in Kansas City, MO. Chuck earned his medical degree from Drexel. Their first date was the next day: a Harry Potter film. The rest is magic, and they soon will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary and 13th year with St. Luke’s, where they came to train and chose to stay. Erin Bendas, DO, is now the chief of Palliative & Support Medicine and Chuck Bendas, MD, is a trauma/surgical critical care physician. While their path to finding love isn’t the same as everyone’s, it works for them, and grows day by day.