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Hartzells certainly see eye to eyewhen focusing on medical careers - Sunday Patriot News
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Ophthalmologists
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 By Elizabeth Gibson Dr. David Larry Hartzell’s patients watched his four children grow up through the elementary and high school pictures that decorated the examining room counters in his ophthalmology office. Now, two of those kids also are “Eye Doctors” and have joined their father in his South Middleton Twp. practice. There are in fact four Hartzells in that practice, since Hartzell’s wife, Janet, manages the office and runs its contact lens department. A third child of the clan is in medical school, weighing specialties. ”I never expected my [grown children] to come back to Carlisle. I’m really happy they did. It’s nice to have them around,” Hartzell said of son, David Leigh, and daughter, Kathy Rupp. His son joined the practice in 1998 while it was in the Belvedere Medical Center in Carlisle. Hartzell’s first office was on West Pomfret Street, where he took over the former Stoner practice in 1973. David Leigh, 33, the oldest Hartzell child was a Crestview Elementary School pupil then but already had ideas about the future. “Since I was a kid, I wanted to work with Dad,” he said. After his residency in Syracuse, N.Y., he weighed several offers to work with trauma patients and children with eye birth defects in need of plastic surgery, but decided those jobs would take him too far from home. “I couldn’t have come to Carlisle and I couldn’t have worked with Dad,” he said. Kathy, 30, just finished her residency at Hershey Medical Center and for a time considered pediatrics and other specialties. “I wasn’t sure when I started medical school,” she said. “Dad always liked [ophthalmology] so much, it made me interested in it. He’s always eager to learn new things, and he’s good at doing them.” “To me, it’s a great specialty. You get to take care of people’s eyesight,” Hartzell said. The Hartzell offspring agreed that their father’s work was a central part of their young lives. “I spent my childhood in the office,” said daughter Kim, 22, a student at Temple University School of Medicine. “She’d take her toys and sit at my desk,” Janet said. Kim said she hasn’t settled on a specialty and the fact that her father, David Leigh and Kathy are in ophthalmology might steer her away from that field. Another Hartzell child, Kristi, 28, studied psychology. Kathy and David Leigh, who are opening a satellite office in Mechanicsburg, said their father doesn’t hover or question their decisions. “I ask him if he minds if I do something and his response is, ‘Do what you feel is best,’” Kathy said. “It was scary for me, measuring up to Dad,” David Leigh said. He said a few patients have told him, “You’re the kid. I was really hoping to see your father.” “Most have been really open and a few have even jumped ship,” asking to see him instead of his father for appointments, he added. “They both seem to know what they’re doing,” Hartzell said of his children / coworkers. “They definitely do things better than I do in some cases. It’s great to consult with them.” He had performed radial keratotomy surgery, involving tiny, surgical incisions made in the cornea to improve vision, but his son is trained to perform LASIK, corrective eye surgery that uses a high energy beam of light to flatten or change the cornea. Yet, Hartzell said, he recently showed his son a new technique. “He looked at me and said, ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ Now, he’s doing the same technique. You have to keep up,” Hartzell said. Ellsworth Harder, a longtime patient, said he heard stories about the four Hartzell kids through almost three decades of visiting the office. “I used to hear them talking about the kids in school,” Harder said. Janet said she’s thrilled with the arrangement. “It’s not like we said, ‘You will go into ophthalmology or you’re disowned,’ but you hate to see them move away. I love the kids so much,” she said. |
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