Published: July 04, 2008 02:18 pm      

VIDEO STORY: The greening of Dr. Donohue

Julie Donohue didn’t turn green all at once.

It was a slow process, unfolding like the wings of a young bird as she slowly came to awareness that every choice she made influenced the course of her life.

The seeds of her greening were planted during her residency in medical school when she was working up to 80 hours a week. The exhausting schedule continued when she became a junior member of a obstetrics and gynecology group. Then she added the joys and responsibilities of a marriage and her own two small babies. It was a big life with not a moment to spare.

“I decided that being an ob-gyn wasn’t compatible with being a sane person and being a mother,” she said recently at her new offices in the Artemis Center in south Lockport.

The greening began in earnest when she took the next step. She decided to stop delivering babies — whose crazy arrivals can disrupt even the most flexible schedule — and concentrate on simply being a gynecologist.

It was her husband’s idea, and she thought it sounded crazy at first, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. She took control of her own destiny and opened an gynecology-only practice in south Lockport.

“It was like I’d found my calling,” she said.

She created a doctor’s office the way she had begun to imagine it, with a complete line of services to keep women well and a community room for classes and gatherings.

Beyond that, becoming independent gave her time to do things she hadn’t had a chance to do in her entire adult life and to meet people who had other interests besides medicine. She made friends with local singer Glenda Chausse and took up playing the guitar.

Her first real “gig,” was just last weekend, when she and Chausse performed with with Lucia Wronski, a counselor at the center, when Wronski’s band played at the Basket Factory in Middleport. “She’s not bad,” said Chausse with a laugh. “She was really nervous at one point and I said, ‘you perform surgery everyday, what’s the worst thing that can happen if you play a wrong note on stage?”

Beyond music, her new friends also talk a lot about spiritual issues, and Donohue has also begun to look at spirituality in a new way, “not as this going to church on Sunday dogma approach that I was raised with, but much more of a path to hope, a path to seeing the divine in everyday life.”

As Donohue expanded her life, her thoughts expanded as well, she said, and she began to believe there was a stronger health connection between body, mind and spirit than she had been taught in medical school.

She started working with a physical therapist on the emotional and physical issues behind pelvic pain, then began working in concert with a psychiatric nurse practitioner. “I realized we can do a much better job of taking care of our patients as a combined force.”

She recruited a nutritionist, a massage therapist, a social worker and others to join her in providing services at here new center. She named it the Artemis Center, after the Greek goddess of the moon.

Donohue began to believe that every decision a person made impacted their health and that “until you make the decision to want to live a healthy lifestyle, to want to be healthy, it is never going to happen.”

That’s when Dr. Julie Donohue went as green as she could be, believing that a healthy environment contributes to a healthy body and Earth.

There is a washer and dryer in the Artemis Center so cloth scrubs and patients gowns can be washed and reused. All records are being digitized to save paper, and every bottle and can is carefully set aside for recycling.

The building that houses the Artemis Center in the Lockport Medical Campus is one of the most environmentally conscious in the area, she said. The exterior walls are made a double layer of concrete filled with Styrofoam, reducing gas and electric bills by 40 percent and increasing air quality.

“People who suffer from allergies tell me the air quality is excellent in here,” she said.

She has grown from a young resident who was chastised for taking too long with her patients, she said, to a doctor who is creating her own path. She wants her patients to understand they can do the same.

“If people lead a healthy lifestyle, control their stress, exercise regularly, eat a healthy diet and feed their souls by doing something that enriches their life, their bodies are going to be healthier,” she said. Not only that, but “they’re going to be better mother’s, daughters, sisters. It’s all related.

“That’s what holistic health is ... and I think that’s the direction American health needs to take in order to improve our overall health.

It can be expected that greening of Donohue will surely continue. A healthy life, she believes, is simply a series of healthy choices. “Once you see your life as a series of choices you’re making, you can see that it really does create the reality you are living in.”

Contact editor Michele DeLuca at693-1000, ext. 157.