Integris Edmond is hospital President Avilla Williams’ baby.
Dr. Gabriel Pardo brings treatment to MS sufferers and recognition to Oklahoma.
The Regional Food Bank is one of the most influential relief efforts in history.
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Former journalist Tres Savage has a vision of free health care. PAGE 10
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OUTLOOK VISIONARIES | ADVANCEMENTS IN HEALTH
THE OKLAHOMAN | NEWSOK.COM
Envisioning a healthy state without smoking and obesity BY SUE HALE Special to the Oklahoman
When I was young, I took health for granted. I didn’t have money but I was getting an education and time was a luxury. Now, I have time and adequate funds. Health, however, is a concern, not just for me but all of
Oklahoma. Enter Central Oklahoma Turning Point. Its goal is to educate Oklahomans how to be healthy. We envision an Oklahoma where no one smokes, obesity is rare and this state leads the nation in healthy lifestyles, no longer rated in the bottom 10 of states with the poor-
est health statistics. Visionaries have to be patient, focus on small successes, create strategies and accept educating a few people at a time in order to make a difference. That’s hard. Many give up. Fortunately, a core group is staying the course and seeing the rewards when parents learn to pro-
vide nutritional food for their children, policy makers include walking trails in housing developments and schools adopt nonsmoking policies. Collaboration has become critical. The Health Alliance for the Uninsured started because competitive health providers came together to share statistics
ROSALYN JOHNSON | CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS INC.
Director calls care for needy a passion BY RANDY ELLIS Staff Writer rellis@opubco.com
Making sure poor Oklahomans have access to quality medical and dental care is more than just a job for Rosalyn Johnson — it’s a heartfelt mission. Johnson said she believes she has been preparing all her life for her job as chief executive officer of Community Health Centers Inc., a nonprofit organization that operates five federally subsidized health care clinics in central Oklahoma. “I’m the product of a single-parent home and was born and raised in the projects of Chicago,” Johnson said. “All my life I have seen people die who didn’t need to die.” “My own mother died from heart disease that was secondary to a lack of dental care,” she said. Johnson said her mother’s gums became infected. Sepsis later spread to other parts of her body, leading to her death. The preventability of it left a lasting impression on Johnson, whose job as Community Health Centers CEO places her in a position to assist thousands
Rosalyn Johnson chief executive officer of Community Health Centers Inc.
of central Oklahoma residents in similar predicaments.
Wide range of care Because the nonprofit organization’s clinics are federally subsidized, they are able to offer a marketbasket of health care services on an ability-to-pay, sliding-scale basis, she said. The main clinic is the Mary Mahoney Memorial Health Center at 12716 NE 36 in eastern Oklahoma County. It offers medical, dental and mental health care, as well as lab, X-ray, pharmacy and other services. The organization offers medical care for the homeless at 411 NW 11 in Oklahoma City and additional clinics in Langston and
northeast Oklahoma City. Not all services are offered at all locations. Johnson said subsidized dental care, in particular, is in high demand, with some patients coming to the Mary Mahoney clinic from as far away as Texas and Arkansas. “One thing we tell patients is we want to provide their primary care physicians,” Johnson said, explaining clinic doctors would rather see patients on a regular basis and prevent medical problems than constantly respond to emergencies. The clinics never lack for patients, with about 17,000 patients making about 50,000 visits to the clinics this past year. The need for services is to be expected in a state that ranks among the worst in the nation for its mortality rate, heart disease, strokes and lack of physical activity, she said.
Molded for the role As she looks at her background, she can see how she has been molded for the task at hand. As a teenager, Johnson said she went away from home to go to college but
discovered she wasn’t ready for the experience, so she returned home to attend the Cook County School of Nursing. “I met my husband, who joined the military,” she said. As Johnson followed her husband to duty stations in Europe and elsewhere, she said she discovered she had aptitude for business, so when they moved back to Texas, she obtained a bachelor of business administration in accounting from Angelo State University. Later, she decided to meld her aptitude for business with her passion for health care and obtained a master’s of business administration in business and health organization management from Texas Tech University. Among the jobs she held before her current one were clinic administrator for the Oklahoma CityCounty Health Department, corporate compliance and epidemiology manager for the citycounty health department and director of primary care clinics at the University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas.
and start free clinics that give the uninsured a medical home where their medical history can be tracked. We have a long way to go. I believe our end goal would be much farther in the future if we hadn’t started 10 years ago. Giving up now is not an option. Being a health visionary
Sue Hale
is difficult but all our children and our grandchildren deserve quality of life. That drives the passionate few to believe success is attainable. — SUE HALE IS THE OKLAHOMAN’S FORMER EXECUTIVE EDITOR AND CO-CHAIR OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA TURNING POINT.
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DR. JORDAN TANG | OKLAHOMA MEDICAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION RESEARCHER
Researcher solves medical puzzles ON THE COVER DR. JORDAN TANG AS CLARK KENT/SUPERMAN IN AN HOMAGE TO SUPERMAN COVER DESIGNER ALEX ROSS
Internationally recognized scientist Jordan Tang works on enzyme research in his lab at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in this 1958 photo. PHOTO PROVIDED BY OKLAHOMA MEDICAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION
BY SONYA COLBERG Staff Writer scolberg@opubco.com
Every day and every night, seven days a week, the light stayed on in the little research lab in Oklahoma City. Before it was switched off after midnight, it illuminated a young researcher named Jordan Tang, hunched over his lab table with test tubes and vials of chemicals. The quiet genius knew he had to crack the composition of a cousin to a stomach enzyme he discovered earlier as a technician. But this enzyme wouldn’t tell. Undeterred, Tang pursued the truth every day for six years. Then one Sunday morning, Tang conducted one last experiment and clicked off the light at 2 a.m. That last piece of evidence once again had evaded his grasp. He drove home and crawled into bed next to his sleeping wife, Kuen. At 5 a.m., his eyes flew open. The pieces of the composition began coming to light in his mind’s eye. He woke his wife. “Look! Look! I think I’ve finished!” he said. “Really?” his stunned wife asked. Tang jumped up, threw on his clothes and rushed to the research laboratory in the hospital at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. He switched on the light and examined all the evidence again and again. He went through the results of the experiment and got the final confirmation of the scientific data at 10:30 that night. “I was the only person on Earth who knew that piece of information at that point,” Tang said. He ran out of his lab, into the hospital lobby, where he spotted the head nurse in charge of the night shift. “I threw up my hands. I said, ‘I’ve done it! I’ve finished!’ “I hugged her and I ran out of the building,” Tang said. “She must have thought I was crazy.”
A biological scissor Tang had been working on the chemical structure of pepsin, the prototype of a biological scissor called protease. In his eureka moment, he realized he had found a bridge structure that gave him the final piece of the chemical structure of pepsin. His experience with scissor enzymes led him to discover a way to make small molecules called inhibitors to stop these scissors from cutting proteins. Later, scientists found that the AIDS virus used the same type of biological scissor to assemble the virus. From there, Tang’s team moved into HIV research. Scientists used Tang’s work to design many drugs used in today’s drug cocktail to treat HIV patients. By serendipity, his continuing biological scissor work led to his research team’s discovery in 1999 of memapsin-2, a brain enzyme involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. “For many years, people
If somebody gave me a million dollars, maybe I’d say, ‘How nice,’ and it would keep me happy for maybe a half-day. If I discovered something of great significance, the happiness would last for a long time.”
Tang is most known for groundbreaking discoveries in the field of Alzheimer’s study, ultimately finding an enzyme that might lead to treatment of the terrible, debilitating disease. Like the mild-mannered Clark Kent, who keeps the secret of his alter ego to himself, finding cures takes years of painstaking research, with little glory. But while many would concur Tang’s a perfect model for Superman, he disagrees. “Although I have not seen much about the Superman cartoon or in TV shows, I know that he is a heroic figure who saves people in trouble and fights evil. My self image is not that of a hero, so it is hard to have a great resonance with the Superman.” Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to Tang to be photographed in his white lab coat, revealing the “S” on his sweater, but it does to the many who hope his discoveries lead to a cure. YVETTE WALKER,
OMRF researcher Dr. Jordan Tang poses with an image of a Superman painting by Alex Ross at The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City.
OUTLOOK EDITOR
PHOTO BY DOUG HOKE, THE OKLAHOMAN
DR. JORDAN TANG
were looking for it,” Tang said. “And we sort of stumbled over it and recognized what it was.” He redirected the team into the area that turned Tang into a sort of superhero: Alzheimer’s disease. An estimated 5.4 million Americans live with the disease, including 74,000 Oklahomans.
Beginning in China Tang insists he’s not even close to a superhero and that his parents never envisioned their little average student would rise to become a famous researcher. Tang attended a oneroom, wood-frame school in southern China, where teachers noted his inability to memorize facts. His thinking process prevented him from seeing the trees for the forest. He doesn’t get bogged down with the details and somehow quickly understands relationships between facts. “I have trouble remembering my own phone number, if I’m confronted all of a sudden,” Tang said. There were early hints that Tang was cut out to grasp something much more than simple memorization. Fascinated with the inventor Thomas Edison, Tang and his brother put together a little notebook with the slightly ambitious title of “Invention Book.” Whenever they dreamed up an invention, they entered it in the book. The entries were more than cute. One was prophetic. “You know the moving sidewalk at the airport? I remember mine had two wheels and a belt so you could move people from one place to another,” Tang said, recalling the first invention he drew in the notebook at age 7. “I had invented it before I saw it in an airport in the United States.” Tang, who describes the research world as a tough one where only the fittest survive, may have picked up some of that aptitude as a child of World War II. As Japanese airplanes began bombing his hometown, the Tang children were rushed away to live in a secluded hilly village with relatives. When their father, an educator with the government, felt it was safe, the family was reunited and eventually returned to their hometown.
Shared interests The family later moved to Taiwan, where Tang attended college. After military service, he got his master’s degree from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater in 1957. There, he met his wife and discovered they had attended the same high school in Taiwan and shared an interest in research. Tang went to work as a technician at Oklahoma
Medical Research Foundation in 1957 and Kuen soon also went into research on the OU Health Sciences campus. The couple married in a tiny chapel behind OMRF and began their family. They have two sons, Albert and Joseph. Buoyed by his “stroke of luck” in discovering the new stomach enzyme that launched his research career at OMRF, Tang got his Ph.D. from the University
of Oklahoma in 1961. He completed his postgraduate work at the University of Cambridge in England.
Lasting happiness He returned to the research lab at OMRF in 1966, where he still sometimes clicks off the light late at night, though now it’s the light from his laptop at home. Tang said he loves his job and is most passionate about making
new discoveries of significance that can ultimately add considerably to knowledge, medicine or people’s well-being. “If somebody gave me a million dollars, maybe I’d say, ‘How nice,’ and it would keep me happy for maybe a half-day,” Tang said. “If I discovered something of great significance, the happiness would last for a long time.”
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AVILLA WILLIAMS | PRESIDENT OF INTEGRIS HEALTH EDMOND
New Edmond hospital is president’s baby BY DIANA BALDWIN Staff Writer dbaldwin@opubco.com
EDMOND — Avilla Williams keeps a notebook beside her bed for the sleepless nights when she can’t stop thinking about the $94 million hospital and medical office complex being built under her watch. Her staff knows it will be a busy day when she shows up with her notes in hand and an announcement that she didn’t sleep the night before. Williams, president of Integris Health Edmond, is overseeing the construction of a 40-bed hospital just north of 15th Street and Interstate 35. She considers the hospital her baby. She helped design it, build it, staff it and will run it when it opens in the fall. Williams gets a little emotional when she talks about her vision for the hospital. “No matter the outcome, when people leave here I want them to say they got compassionate care,” Williams said while looking at the three-story hospital being built among the trees on 44 acres of hilly terrain. The concept for the project is about bringing the outdoors inside to help with the healing. “We always come back
Avilla Williams, president of Integris Health Edmond, poses at the construction site of the city’s new hospital and medical offices. PHOTOS BY JIM BECKEL, THE OKLAHOMAN
to the concept,” Williams said. “We want our patients comfortable.” Natural tones — greens, browns, golds and taupes — are being carried from the outside to the inside. Wood and rock also are be-
ing used inside. Large windows line the walls throughout the hospital, medical office and a walkway between the two buildings. Williams spent about a year working on the hospi-
tal design. She wants the patients and guests to have easy access to whatever they need, whether it’s a hospital bed, outpatient care, laboratory tests or an X-ray. The hospital’s relation-
ship with the community is something Williams takes seriously. Her staff has worked closely with city officials to make sure their vision is part of the project. Like many places in Ed-
mond, a piece of public art will stand outside the entrance to the hospital. Williams selected the bronze statue of a nurse and child. “We want this to be a place that Edmond will be proud of,” she said.
MEDICINE | JAMES LONG, PHILLIP STRATEMEIER AND JAMES DIXSON
Doctors bring innovation to Oklahoma medical fields BY SONYA COLBERG
spiritually. He established a foundation with his wife, Bonnie, to deliver health care and humanitarian aide in Calcutta, India.
Stratemeier is considered a visionary partially because of his work in the imaging of hearts. The hospital uses a calcium score to identify heart disease probability after a 10 second CT scan of a patient’s heart. He said now doctors can look at coronary arteries without having to put a catheter in a patient. “We use a CT scan with much higher detail so we can see these arteries: Are they open? Are they closed? Or are they someplace in between?” The newest big thing in brain imaging is called tractography. “This is beautiful stuff,” Stratemeier said. Tractography shows the location of certain parts of the brain in three dimensions. “You can show the neurosurgeon: Here’s the elegant pathway. This is something that controls voice, here’s something that controls hearing or speech or movement. Stay away from that tract ... get to a tumor by a different method,” he said. He said doctors hope to have that type of imaging within a year.
Phillip Stratemeier, St. Anthony Hospital
James Dixson, Mercy Health Center
Phillip Stratemeier says it’s unbelievable that sitting around looking at a computer can be so much fun. Stratemeier was a freshly minted radiologist when he left his Kansas City home to take a job at St. Anthony for just a few years. That was 32 years ago. As others recognized his visionary bent, he progressed to his present position as medical director of radiology. Imaging three decades or so ago revolved around X-rays, sometimes ultrasound and a touch of nuclear medicine. But now the imaging business is exploding and Stratemeier envisions even more exciting developments. He does a lot of neuroradiology, focusing on abnormalities of areas including the spine, head and neck. “Dr. Stratemeier has always challenged us to not be afraid to be innovative, to push the boundaries of imaging,” said Jeffrey Neff, administrative director of Cardiovascular and Diagnostic Services.
The medical profession drew in James Dixson when he was growing up in Seminole in southeastern Oklahoma. As a high school sophomore, he found a job at the hospital as an orderly. It gave him an inside look at the profession as he performed routine, nonmedical chores all the way through undergraduate school at the University of Oklahoma. After medical school at OU and a residency, he began practicing internal medicine in Guthrie. Hospitals had focused for years on delivering primary care. But two decades ago, the Guthrie doctor envisioned a better way to practice medicine and Dixson became the first physician in 1991to join the Mercy Health Network. “We see literally millions of patients a year ... about 4.5 million last year. Only about 150,000 of those ended up in the hospital. It’s really about being out in the communities, in these small towns in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas,” said
Staff Writer scolberg@opubco.com
A heart-and-lung surgeon with Integris Baptist Medical Center, a radiologist with St. Anthony Hospital and a president of Mercy Health Center’s primary care division all are considered visionaries in the medical field.
Dr. James Long
James Long, Integris Baptist Medical Center James Long touched hearts years before he began replacing them. The world-renowned cardio thoracic surgeon followed his missionary parents around as they administered to the hearts and souls of people in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines. The mission to serve got him into medicine, while his penchant for technology helped move him into the field of advanced heart care. “It used to be that we would give up on end stage heart failure,” said Long, co-director of Integris Baptist Medical Center’s advanced cardiac care program. “Historically, end stage meant just that.” He began doing heart transplants a couple of decades ago to help more people live longer and ultimately reach the end of life with grace. “The biggest limitation is today we will get access to six donor hearts across the entire United States. Only six. And there are 5,000 people on the waiting list today for those six hearts,” Long said. Inventors decided a transplant, while pretty good, wasn’t good enough. So when technology jumped into the area of artificial hearts, Long was ready. In fact, he helped develop some devices and became an investigator with the first implantable heart pump approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Technology has improved and more people are getting a second chance at life. Long used different types of devices, ranging from those that replace the heart to those that allow doctors to leave the real heart in place and implant a pump that delivers blood to the body. Long continues to be involved in matters of the heart, both physically and
Dr. Phillip Stratemeier
Dr. James Dixson
Dixson, president of Mercy’s primary care division. Knowing all these doctors had to find an easier way to communicate about patients, Mercy leaders determined electronic health records were the way to go. A portion rolled out in the past few months, called My Mercy. It allows
patients to log on and do everything from seeing their own lab reports, to making doctor’s appointments online, to requesting a prescription refill, to pulling up their children’s immunization records. Already, more than 100,000 Mercy patients are using that feature. “Think about the mom
who has a sick child at 3 a.m. They want to get into see their pediatrician. They can go online at 3 in the morning and make an appointment for the next day to be seen,” Dixson said. “It’s really the patient’s link to their electronic health record. It really makes them truly a part of their health care team.”
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DR. GABRIEL PARDO | MEDICAL DIRECTOR FOR THE OKLAHOMA MEDICAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION’S NEW MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
Pursuing MS cure is an ongoing dream AT A GLANCE WHAT IS MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS?
Dr. Gabriel Pardo, medical director of OMRF’s Multiple Sclerosis Center for Excellence, is pictured at the center in Oklahoma City. PHOTO BY DAVID MCDANIEL, THE OKLAHOMAN
BY SONYA COLBERG Staff Writer scolberg@opubco.com
The unconventional twists and turns of multiple sclerosis physician Gabriel Pardo’s life began in an unexpected location, considering his raven eyes and olive complexion. “I was born in Lincoln, Neb.,” Pardo said with a rapid-fire Latin inflection, “as you can tell from my accent.” By all rights, Pardo should have been born in Bogota, Columbia, instead of Lincoln. He was born in Nebraska while his economist father was taking a summer class there as part of his master’s degree course work. When the class ended, the parents swaddled their new baby to return to their hometown of Bogota to raise him within a close, extended family. All seemed in place for Pardo to proceed through life in a conventional, somewhat uneventful manner. But that didn’t happen. The world was nearly robbed of watching the child grow into a physician of international stature. One warm day during a family outing at a Bogota area park, 4-year-old Gabriel and his father climbed into a one-man
kayak and paddled out into the lake. Suddenly, something went terribly wrong. The kayak flipped. Little Gabriel couldn’t swim. He and his father were pinned upside down in the cockpit, struggling to get out; struggling not to gulp in the churning, dirty water. They finally shoved themselves out of the kayak but they became separated in the confusion. Gabriel dropped to the bottom of the lake. Somehow, he kicked off from the lake bottom and propelled himself upward until he hit the legs of his father, who was swimming furiously through the murky water in search of his boy. After that, Pardo’s parents immediately incorporated proper swimming lessons into their children’s education. The boy’s formal education took an unconventional course to a bilingual school in Bogota taught by Benedictine monks from North Dakota. Pardo, 48, remembers his principal and the monks, whose disciplined, contemplative teaching turned out students who eventually became presidents and cabinet ministers of the nation — and doctors. Pardo said he would
never have accomplished what he has done without the guidance of his family and the monks’ stringent, disciplined instruction.
The best lesson “The outcome of learning is not to know facts but to know your way out of a problem. To solve a problem,” Pardo said. “That is what I do everyday when I’m seeing patients. That methodical approach to learning is what I do. It’s what I continue to do every single day.” Pardo entered medical school when he was 17. Following high school, students in Colombia go immediately to a professional school, such as medical school, which lasts several years longer than in the United States. With medical school at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada behind him, Pardo completed further training, a number of residencies and a faculty appointment in Colombia. He received more training, including a fellowship in Galveston, Texas, to study neuro-ophthalmology, or the study of eyesight related to the nerves. In Galveston, Pardo fell in love twice: Once with the baffling disease of multiple sclerosis and again with his future wife, Diana
Hampton, an Oklahoma City woman who was finishing medical school. After the couple returned to Oklahoma for additional medical training at the University of Oklahoma, Hampton became an ophthalmologist in Edmond and Pardo continued working with multiple sclerosis patients. They are raising two daughters — 8-year-old Isabela, who knows how to roll her r’s like her dad and wants to be a veterinarian, and 5-year-old Carolina, who complains that she still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. Pardo said he loves just spending time with his girls.
The ultimate goal For the past 11 years, he has devoted his work hours to MS, bringing treatment to thousands of MS sufferers and recognition to Oklahoma for MS treatment and clinical study. Pardo’s efforts led to the creation in 2004 of The MS Center of Oklahoma at Mercy’s NeuroScience Institute. In January, Pardo became the medical director for the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation’s new Multiple Sclerosis Center of Excellence, 825 NE 13 in
Oklahoma City. The center opened in March. It is designed to allow top scientists to work with MS doctors treating and devising new treatments for the nation’s 400,000 MS patients, and Oklahoma’s 4,000 patients. “Finding a cure is the ultimate, ultimate goal,” Pardo said. “We realize the process is long and defining a cure is relative.” Some “super responders” take today’s medications and do so well, without relapses, that those people have what amounts to a cure for them, he said. But he dreams of a similar scenario for all patients.
A distant dream Though an MS cure is still a distant dream, he said this is a history-making time for the disease that affects the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. He points to the center opening and the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval last fall of fingolimod capsules to replace frequent injections or monthly hospital infusions. Pardo said he goes to bed smiling after a day’s work with MS patients. “After I’ve treated someone they often say, ‘Thank you so much.’ But I say, ‘Don’t thank me. It’s
MS is a chronic, unpredictable disease of the brain, optic nerves and spinal cord. The central nervous system disorder is thought to be an autoimmune disorder, in which the immune system attacks the person’s healthy tissue. I Symptoms include: blurred vision, loss of balance, poor coordination, slurred speech, tremors, numbness, extreme fatigue, problems with memory and concentration, paralysis and blindness. These problems may be permanent or may come and go. I Age of diagnosis: usually between the ages of 20 and 50, but 2-year-olds and 75-year-olds have developed it. I Deaths: MS is not considered a fatal disease. The vast majority of people with it live a normal life span, though they may face increasing limitations. A large Scottish study looked at 216 multiple sclerosis deaths and found the mean survival period was 24.5 years. One-third of patients survived longer than 30 years after onset. The age of death ranged between 25 and 80 years, with the majority dying in the seventh decade. SOURCES: NATIONAL
MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY; JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHIATRY
something I do for myself. It makes me feel good.’” Pardo said he intends to continue seeing MS patients for the rest of his life. In the end, he jokes that he’d like his tombstone to quote an inside family joke saying, “I was right.” He said he often takes a position different from his wife and, “lo and behold, I end up being right.” So his wife likes to tease that those words will be inscribed on his tombstone. If not that inscription, he’d like to have one that says, “A family man that cared about what he did, about the community. A man that really cared.”
SCOTT SABOLICH | OWNER OF SCOTT SABOLICH PROSTHETICS AND RESEARCH
Third-generation prosthetist makes mark in Oklahoma City BY MICHAEL KIMBALL Staff Writer mkimball@opubco.com
Scott Sabolich says he still gets a rush at work every day. Patients who have recently had limbs amputated or lost in accidents come into his Oklahoma City business and put painful surgeries, rehabilitation and memories behind them. “When they walk in our doors here, we turn the corner on pain and lack of ability,” Sabolich said. “Everyone has told them bad news until they get to our door, and then we tell them good news. We get to see their faces light up and eyes tear up.” Sabolich, 39, is the owner of Scott Sabolich Prosthetics and Research, 10201 N Broadway Extension. He is part of the third generation of his family to practice in prosthetics in Oklahoma City. His
grandfather, the late Lester Sabolich, opened a prosthetics business here in 1946. Scott’s father, John Sabolich, followed and John’s own two sons and grandson continued in prosthetics. “My dad was my hero,” Scott Sabolich said. “You know how little kids want to do what their hero does when they grow up? Well, my dad could make someone walk. ... I idolized what he did and wanted to have that same kind of rush.”
Known worldwide The Sabolich family has turned Oklahoma City into a hub in the prosthetics industry. The name is so well-known that a Russian man with no legs showed up at Will Rogers World Airport knowing only one word that the locals here understood: Sabolich. Sabolich has done his part to carry the family name, and the family busi-
ness, across the globe. He has worked with American athletes since the 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta, and was Team USA’s prosthetist in the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing. His prosthetics helped U.S. athletes claim 10 medals and set six new world records. Sabolich, who raced sprint cars as a youth, said helping athletes at the highest level allows him to feed his competitive spirit. “I love competition and professional racing. That was my thing,” Sabolich said. “Now I can live vicariously through these guys and be their pit crew. I mean, I’m the pit crew for Team USA. How cool is that?”
Joy in helping Sabolich credits the low cost of living in Oklahoma City with helping make his business competitive. The lower overhead lets his
team do things it wouldn’t be able to in another location, he said. And the medical talent in the prosthetics field and other areas means some of the best professionals in the business are close by, he said. About 3,000 people per week in the United States lose a limb, Sabolich said, and many are not athletes. He and his team of 40 employees find joy in helping each one of the many individuals who come through their door, he said. “You get this incredible feeling doing what you do that you can’t get anywhere else in the medical field,” Sabolich said. “I can give somebody their walk back. If they’re a leg amputee using crutches, I can give them their hands back. You can go pick up your kid. You can go running across the yard with them — things that are intangible and amazing things in life that we take for granted.”
Scott Sabolich, seen here with some casts, followed in the footsteps of his grandfather and father to work with those who have lost their limbs. PHOTO BY DOUG HOKE, THE OKLAHOMAN
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TRES SAVAGE | PROJECT COORDINATOR FOR THE REMOTE AREA MEDICAL VOLUNTEER CORPS
THE OKLAHOMAN | NEWSOK.COM
RODNEY BIVENS | REGIONAL FOOD BANK FOUNDER
Food bank founder recalls how hunger impacted him BY BRYAN PAINTER Staff Writer bpainter@opubco.com
Tres Savage works at the Variety Care clinic in south Oklahoma City. PHOTO BY PAUL B. SOUTHERLAND, THE OKLAHOMAN
Ex-journalist follows vision in health care BY VALLERY BROWN Staff Writer vbrown@opubco.com
As a journalist, Tres Savage observed the rancor and emotion swirling around the health care debate in Congress and at the state Legislature, where he worked as a reporter. He was on the outside, looking in, until the day he dove headlong into the hard-to-navigate and often frustrating position of helping people access medical care. A 2008 news broadcast about the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps so stirred the curious and persistent reporter, he decided to raise money, form a committee of volunteers and eventually change careers to bring the organization to Oklahoma City. Along the way, Savage helped change state laws to allow volunteer doctors from out of state to give free medical services. “I think there’s a belief that the only people who can’t access health care are the bums on the street begging for money,” said Savage, 26. “My life goal is for everyone to have access to quality care.” The fruit of his labor — a three-day event in July 2010 at State Fair Park — brought out mothers, children, middle-class workers, grandparents, the insured, uninsured and people who’d never seen a health care provider. More than 1,600 Oklahomans in need of medical, dental and vision care waited in lines amid tents, medical equipment and just shy of 1,000 volunteers. By all accounts, the event was a success. But for Savage, the only child of a history professor and archeologist, the job had just begun.
650,000 uninsured “Let’s say we help 2,000 this weekend and somehow we could make it happen every weekend of the year. That’s only 104,000 people. There are 650,000 uninsured people in Oklahoma,” he said. Savage was struck by the number of middleaged women attending the event who needed annual gynecological exams. Nearly 60 percent of attendees were women, and of the 102 pap smears performed, some 15 percent came back positive for an abnormality. “Those are someone’s moms, daughters, sisters,” he said. Pam Cross, executive director for the Health Alliance for the Uninsured, met Savage in 2009 as he was planning to bring the project to Oklahoma and seeking volunteers and a board of professionals who could plan the logistics of bringing Remote Area Medical to the state. “I was immediately struck by his vision,” Cross said. “As a young person having the wherewithal to
DID YOU KNOW? REMOTE AREA MEDICAL Remote Area Medical is a Tennesseebased organization founded by Stan Brock, of “Wild Kingdom” television show fame. Founded in 1985, the nonprofit, all-volunteer organization mobilizes medical professionals to bring no-cost health care to people worldwide.
CONTACT For more information about Variety Care services and locations, go to www.varietycare.org or call 632-6688.
see a need and a partial solution and to dedicate himself to that was pretty exceptional.” Cross is keenly aware of the need for medical services for uninsured and underinsured Oklahomans. She and Savage see eye-toeye on continuing care and options for people in need of services. Many people who were served at the event also are patients at charitable clinics in the area.
Ongoing care needed “That might be the first time they sought care, but it couldn’t be the end of their care,” Cross said. “It had to be ongoing.” Savage now works at the nonprofit community health center Variety Care, which offers medical, dental, behavioral and vision care to patients on a sliding scale based on income. “It’s for people who have insurance and don’t,” Savage said. “But it lets them take ownership of their health care.” Cross said Savage continues to bring innovative ideas to the health care community. His background brings a fresh vision to his efforts. He was a finalist for the Blue Cross Blue Shield 2010 Champions of Health awards in the category of Champion of the Uninsured. “He struck me as a very sincere and focused and, for all of his youth, he somehow has gained life experience that had caused him to be sensitive to people in need,” Cross said. While the Remote Area Medical project is on hiatus in Oklahoma this year, Savage is working on a pilot project that would bring services to women in need of gynecological services. While he doesn’t know exactly what the future has in store, he’s not slowing down anytime soon. “This is life and death and the solutions are doable,” Savage said. “We have people standing in lines waiting for services, and we have people willing to provide them.”
The year the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma started, 1980, the organization delivered 280,000 pounds of food to about 35 organizations in or very close to Oklahoma County. Rodney Bivens, executive director and founder of the food bank, said in the fiscal year ending last June 30, the organization distributed 36.5 million pounds of food to about 53 counties. Based on distribution in the first half of this fiscal year, it appears that number will climb as high as 42 million pounds by the end of June. The Oklahoman recently talked with Bivens about the issue of hunger in this state. Q: When was the first time you realized someone you knew or had come across was chronically hungry and how did that impact you? A: I do remember when I was really young that I saved up my pennies and bought a dozen baby chicks at Easter. I rigged a cardboard box with a light to keep them alive and watered and fed the chicks scraps every day. I remember that most of them lived, and my parents were really happy when they started laying eggs. Unfortunately, a day came when my dad had to kill the chickens so that we had food for our family. I never did get over that. My parents always shared food from our garden — and in this case, the chicken coop — with other families that were struggling. Q: Did you have any friends when you were a child that you knew weren’t getting enough to eat? If so, do you still think about them when you see one of the backpacks filled with food in the Food for Kids program? A: I think about my friend Walter, who was later killed in Vietnam. His father always seemed to be home and his mother had several chronic medical conditions that prevented her from working. As I reflect back on all this, I now realize that other challenges existed in the home that were probably related to alcohol. Walter had a younger brother and sister. I remember how thin they were and how fast they ate the little food they had. I remember sneaking food out of our house for Walter, even though my parents would have given it if I had asked. The Food for Kids backpack program would have helped Walter and his sister and brother. Q: At what point did you go from observing to battling hunger? A: Formally, it started in graduate school. Part of my practicum in the field included training in public housing projects and youth projects. I saw the true effects of children and seniors struggling to get by and not having enough food. Many children were skipping school and wandering the streets, and many seniors were living alone and felt left behind. My first job after graduate school involved helping start a food co-op, an emergency food closet and mobile meals program for folks in eastern Oklahoma County. I started going door to door, introducing myself to get families involved in the food co-op as a way for them to get to know me. Later, several of the churches invited me to speak to their congregation and were willing to start emergency food pantries for the community. I’ve just always had this will — which probably stemmed from my own
Rodney Bivens Executive director of the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma
childhood experiences — to make sure that everyone has access to food. Q: Feeding the hungry brings both pain in realizing the suffering and joy in realizing a need fulfilled. Do the two ever balance out? A: As long as there is one child, one senior or one individual who is struggling with hunger, there is not a balance. I choose not to see it as suffering, but as a challenge. Everyone has challenges in life – it’s how we respond to those challenges that matters. We have a responsibility to help our neighbors who are struggling to keep food on their table — many of whom have had to swallow their pride and ask for help for the first time in their lives. It is through sharing the stories of their lives and their challenges that
we provide hope for a brighter future. Q: What encourages you the most about how individuals in Oklahoma respond to the needs of others? A: As they say, “Is this a great state or what?” We have a strong and rich history in Oklahoma of sharing through our faith, our deeds and our means. We have a diverse culture of people that is bound by the common thread of respect for each other’s humanity toward each other. While it has been tested at times through man-made and natural disasters, Oklahoma’s best has always been about sharing with others in times of need. Oklahomans truly recognize that no one in this great state of ours should be without food because of behavior or circumstance.
Q: What encourages you about how the corporate community responds to those in need? A: We are extremely blessed to have the richness of corporate support for our community. I think the revitalization of downtown, changes on the river and the continued investment in our infrastructure and people speaks to the leadership, vision and compassion that exist in our corporate community. Whether they are donating food, funds or volunteers, we are extremely fortunate to have the support of the corporate community in Oklahoma. Our partnership of so many individuals, corporations, the faith community and foundations allows us to continue fighting hunger and feeding hope.
THE OKLAHOMAN
NEWSOK.COM
SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2011
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SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2011
THE OKLAHOMAN
NEWSOK.COM