Larry Alan Nafe : Animal magnetism
Posted on Sunday, March 18, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Northwest_Profiles/184885/
SELF-PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: May 12, 1952, St. Louis. My favorite animals are probably dogs. But I love cats, too. I always have cats, dogs and horses. The animal I’d like to be is a horse. They’re kind of free-spirited, quick and beautiful. My favorite breed of dog is the Doberman pinscher. My pets are my Doberman, Bear, who is 121 pounds and 2 years old, a cat named Lilly, and six horses. My favorite surgery is on the spine. When the animal is either in chronic pain or paralyzed, if you catch it early, he’ll do great. It’s extremely rewarding. The most unusual surgery I have performed was on a Bengal tiger who’d eaten a basketball. He deflated it, and then he swallowed the whole thing. We had to go in surgically and remove it. The last good book I read was Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. My pet peeve about society is nobody wants to take personal responsibility. It’s always somebody else’s fault. If something’s not going right, you need to look internally first. The best advice I’ve ever gotten is the harder you work, the luckier you’ll be. My grandfather always used to tell me that. One word to sum me up: optimistic
LITTLE ROCK — A
5-year-old cocker
spaniel mix named
Mia has been trying
to wag her tail for her owners, but it hurts to move it. She also has stopped jumping and cries when she’s touched, symptoms of weakness and back pain. She has been on medication to reduce swelling for a year, but now that she’s partly paralyzed, Larry Nafe decides it is time for surgery. Under anesthesia and Nafe’s methodical fingers, Mia is receiving a laminectomy. That requires a 5-inch incision down her back to remove the lamina vertebral bone and get to the spinal canal, so Nafe can remove a ruptured disk.
With the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball championship in mind, Nafe talks of team rankings and how he expects the tournament to go. Classic rock is playing in the operating room. But the Little Rock veterinarian is far from distracted. Having performed some 3, 000 spinal surgeries since he opened Hillcrest Animal Hospital on Kavanaugh Boulevard with his veterinarian wife, Joan, in 1983, he now averages one such surgery a day. The procedure has become second nature to him.
“After he’s done thousands, the one he did today will be just as important as the one 20 years ago,” says his wife.
Nafe’s stature in the profession was spotlighted last month when the Arkansas Veterinary Medical Association, marking its 100 th anniversary, voted him Veterinarian of the Year.
After attending the University of Kansas as an undergraduate and graduating from the University of Missouri’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Nafe could have gone into private practice, since, unlike in human medicine, which requires an internship and residency, veterinarians are licensed to practice after finishing their four years of veterinary school.
But Nafe opted to go further, with an internship and a combined residency in internal medicine and neurology / neurosurgery at the Animal Medical Center in New York. With a staff of 80 veterinarians treating more than 100, 000 cases a year when he worked there in the late 1970 s, the Animal Medical Center was one of few teaching hospitals for veterinarians pursuing advanced study. It is still New York’s largest facility for animal care, research and education.
“The whole joke was, every year you spent there was like 20 years in practice,” Nafe says, referring to the 40 surgeries a day he sometimes performed there. “If you were the night surgeon, you’d be the only surgeon on in the city of New York City, so you might operate all night long. It was a fascinating place. It was a very unique opportunity, and the top specialists in every discipline were there.”
Nafe went through a rigorous course of study, series of examinations, supervised specialty work and academic publishing in order to become board-certified first in neurology / neurosurgery, and then in internal medicine. He is the only veterinarian in Arkansas to have achieved diplomat status in these specialties, and he is one of about 100 boarded neurologist / neurosurgeons in the nation.
Born in St. Louis, Nafe met his wife when he was chief resident at the Animal Medical Center, where she was completing an internship. The two moved to Baton Rouge, where he taught at Louisiana State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. They got married in 1980, and daughter Laura was born in 1982.
Specialty practices were rare at that time, so Nafe’s best options were to join a large, multidoctor practice that needed his expertise or continue working at a university. But the couple wanted to go into private practice and raise their daughter in Little Rock, the home of Joan’s family. Arkansas was also a draw because around 120 of Nafe’s former LSU students were practicing here, and thus already had knowledge of his expertise.
So the Nafes bought the building at 2900 Kavanaugh Blvd., which had been a Lion Oil service station and converted it into a doctor’s office in ’ 83. They have expanded several times since. Nafe started developing a clientele for his specialties by traveling to veterinary clinics and consulting in their hospitals, over time developing a rapport with vets around the state. Some of his patients are the pets of people who make trips to Little Rock for their own health care, accomplishing medical visits for everyone at once.
Now Nafe operates a referral-only practice, treating small animals from around the state. Some of the more common cases he sees are spinal-cord and brain problems and ruptured anterior cruciate ligaments — torn ACLs are particularly common among dogs. But he also treats animals with diabetes, cancer (particularly splenic and breast tumors ) chronic gastrointestinal upset and allergies. Then there’s the surgical removal of foreign objects.
Nafe’s wife and Hillcrest Animal Hospital’s other four general-practice veterinarians enjoy the perks of Nafe’s expert neurology and internal medicine knowledge.
“It’s a luxury working in a clinic with him, because if we have any questions at all, we just go to him,” says Joan Nafe. “So we have the best of both worlds — we have both a general practice, but yet, we have his expertise if we need it. And of course, he does all our surgery.”
For Nafe’s colleagues, his presence makes for a constant learning experience.
“I’m always amazed at these veterinarians that are solo practitioners, that are the only ones at their practice, because we lean on one another so much here,” says Sonya LaVergne, who has worked at Hillcrest since 1991. “Six heads are better than one. If you have a case that’s really complicated, and you’re not sure which way to go with it, we’ll all have rounds and examine the animal and go over all the lab work and films, and, of course, he oversees all of that.”
COMPLICATED CASES Because of Nafe’s specialties, Hillcrest Animal Hospital has diagnostic equipment not always found in the typical smallanimal practice. Ultrasounds, echocardiograms of the heart, bronchoscopys, endoscopys and colonoscopys are available. And his latest “toy” will be a CAT scan, accompanied this summer by construction of a room to house the machine.
Others would like to benefit from Nafe’s expertise and skills as well. He receives frequent inquiries from veterinary practices around the country trying to lure him away from Arkansas, but he’s not interested.
“Pets have special places in people’s families here,” he says. “Everybody has a dog, particularly in this neighborhood, and that’s one reason we located here. People love animals here. They take good care of animals, and the establishment of the rescue groups shows the compassion of the people of Little Rock. I unfortunately judge people on how they treat their pets; that’s how I evaluate people. And I think sometimes how a society treats its animals is a reflection on the society.”
Nafe’s selection as Veterinarian of the Year reflects his statewide renown.
“There probably is not a veterinarian in the state who doesn’t know who Larry Nafe is, and there’s probably very few of us in central Arkansas who haven’t sent a case to him,” says Jim Achorn, a veterinarian at Port City Animal Hospital in Pine Bluff. Achorn, who was Nafe’s student at LSU, refers three to four cases a month to Nafe and calls him with questions multiple times a week. He says Nafe not only eagerly responds with his expert opinion, but also knows how to run and interpret special diagnostic tests.
“I’m not able to provide near the level of medicine that he’s able to offer, so when I start getting into cases that require a little bit better insight, I certainly refer them over there,” says Dr. Ed Henkel, a veterinarian at the Stuttgart Animal Clinic, who also was one of Nafe’s students.
“A lot of times, I’ll have cases that I need a little bit of a better handle of what may be going on from his perspective, so I get phone consults,” Henkel says. “A lot of my clients probably think I know a lot more than I really do, because I don’t hesitate to call him for a little backup and support. It’s allowed me to answer problems that I probably wouldn’t do if I hadn’t had help.”
Henkel and Achorn are two of 10 or so vets Nafe might advise on a given day. He goes about his referral work professionally, engaging in follow-up reports and communication with referring veterinarians, and advising clients to return to their original doctors for future problems, Achorn said.
Nafe’s skills go beyond medical knowledge. He also has a knack with the animals, says client Dr. Loretta DePalo of Little Rock. The Nafes have been treating her pets for more than 20 years. “The animals all love him,” DePalo says. “They pretty much trust him immediately. He’s one of those vets that gets down on the floor with the animals, and he’s very interactive with them.” Of the 22 dogs, seven cats, two horses, two pygmy goats, two ducks and a potbellied pig she’s had Nafe tend to, DePalo says, “None of them has ever snapped at him.”
A BOYHOOD MENAGERIE From childhood, it was evident to Nafe and his family that veterinary medicine was his calling. His parents, Jane and George Nafe of Sunset Hills, Mo., let him acquire a menagerie.
“Let me put it this way: You name the animal, we had it at our house,” says his sister, Peggy Dimitriades of St. Louis. “We had everything from chickens, ducks, snakes, squirrels, and then of course, we always had dogs. Our basement was all these assortments of animals. Once, my mom was down there sorting clothes, making the laundry piles, and she lifted up a shirt. There was one of his black snakes. We could hear her scream from the basement.”
The Nafes’ current pet family, on their estate near Roland, consists of one dog and one cat and six horses.
When Nafe decided to specialize within veterinary medicine, he says, two aspects drove him to neurology. He’d grown up with dachshunds, which often suffer from degenerative disk disease, causing paralysis. Back then, there was nothing to be done about it, but now he can successfully correct the affliction.
“The other thing that interested me was the ability to localize an animal’s problems, strictly through physical examination and evaluating them,” he says.
For the Nafes, practicing alongside each other is gratifying.
“We feed on each other,” he says. “We’re both very involved in veterinary medicine; it’s a major component of our lives. We have a tremendous amount in common in that we kind of know the frustrations and the positives.” His wife adds, “It’s been a wonderful work environment.”
Their daughter, Laura, now 25 and in her second year at Missouri’s veterinary school, may join them someday. Though she grew up planning to pursue human medicine, she changed her mind during college.
“I started to realize the importance of what my parents do and realized I wanted to be a part of that as well,” she says. “I started to realize that the relationship my parents have with their clients is much more personal than the relationship most people have with their doctors.”
Her father would seem to agree.
“There’s just nothing better for me than to see a sick animal come in, who is basically helpless — he can’t tell you what’s wrong or he’s paralyzed and can’t walk — and I can operate on him or do something for him and make him happy again,” he says.
“They come in and they can’t even lift their tail up, they can’t move, they can’t breathe or they can’t walk. It would be like helping an infant or a child. That’s very rewarding to me.”