ST. GEORGE — Dr. Kory Woodbury's teasing bedside manner draws the inevitable comparison to a certain surgeon of the hit 1970s TV series "M*A*S*H." The popular series portrayed a medical unit stationed in Korea and its irreverent doctors who often saved lives while dispensing laughter.
Add in the fact that Woodbury is young (he's 37), tall (the nurses are guessing he tops out at 6 feet 5 inches) and disarmingly friendly, and the "Hawkeye" comparison is a done deal. But that's OK with him.
"I gravitated to medicine watching 'M*A*S*H.' It intrigued me," said Woodbury, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George. The Cedar City native performs numerous open-heart surgeries each week and treats each patient with his own cheerful dose of humor.
"I called him a baby-face kid, and he called me a whiny old geezer," said a grinning 60-year-old man who underwent open-heart surgery at DRMC in January.
"I had every confidence in him. He's my kind of people," the Hurricane man said.
Dr. Roger Millar, who recruited Woodbury as his partner for the new open-heart surgery program at DRMC, said his partner is a good fit.
"He's well-trained, a bright young man with family in the area," Millar said. "That's an enhancement. I looked for that in this team."
Both surgeons have had to adjust and make a few changes in their operating style, he said.
"There's been some give and take. We have a standardized front now, and patients benefit the most in that setting," Millar explained. "Routines help you through stress, and we play music in the operating room, too."
The doctors share an operating team of seven specialists, who perform their duties in each surgery no matter the time of day or night.
"This crew is like family. We're a good group of friends," said Millar, who has performed more than 5,000 open-heart surgeries during his 28 years at three hospitals including Intermountain Health Care's LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.
"This place has the potential for having one of the best cardiac surgery centers for someone in private practice," he said. "We want to deliver the best care we can, as economically as we can and as efficiently as we can."
Both Woodbury and Millar said they considered plastic surgery as a possible specialty in their burgeoning medical careers.
"I had a motorcycle accident in college, and I had face reconstruction," said Woodbury. "I thought I wanted to do plastic surgery, but after watching two weeks of heart surgery during med school, I decided that's what I wanted to do."
Millar's childhood years were spent on a farm in Idaho, where he was the youngest of 12.
"I decided in the fourth grade that I would be an engineer, so I went to the University of Utah since they had the best engineering school," Millar recalled. "During year four of my five-year program, I quit and moved to pre-med. I wanted to go to medical school. I came very close to plastic surgery or orthopedics."
So during the late 1950s, when cardiac surgeons began their work in Salt Lake City, Millar found he was reading about the specialty and "hanging out" to watch the surgeries. He was hooked.
"Do you remember the thrill you got in high school, the adrenaline rush when you knew you were going to play in the big game? It's like that every time," Millar said of walking into the operating room.
Woodbury nodded his head in agreement and said, "It's a rush, when you clamp off the heart. It's a magical moment."
Four years ago, Millar toured the 400 East campus of DRMC and decided he could operate there, although it was also clear that a new hospital was needed in southern Utah.
"A lot of these snowbirds felt like they were gambling by staying through the winter," he said. Two years ago, Millar began planning the hospital's open-heart program.
And in November 2003, Millar and Woodbury performed the program's first eight-bypass operation in DRMC's new hospital on River Road. Since that time, the team has performed more than 345 open-heart surgeries with a very low mortality rate of 2 percent, Millar said.
DRMC's specially trained staff also do bypasses, valve repair/replacement, angiograms, angioplasties and stent placements, as well as echocardiograms, nuclear medicine, pacemaker placements and arrhythmia surgeries.
"A large part of our success is these two," said Kim Henrichsen, operations officer with accountability for Dixie Regional Medical Center's heart programs. "They're always smiling and happy. It rubs off on the staff, and really makes a difference in the ICU. These patients turn around fairly quickly."
E-mail: nperkins@desnews.com