Volunteering is a way of life for PJPII Award winner

At the end of his newspaper route, the dedicated Andonie would bike home for breakfast, go to school, do his homework and go to bed around 9:30 p.m. in anticipation of his next nocturnal round of deliveries, forming a habit that still has the spritely 75-year-old needing just five hours of sleep per night.

“I delivered papers for 10 solid years and never missed a day, through high school and college,” recalled Andonie, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist and tireless volunteer. Andonie is this year’s recipient of the Catholic Foundation’s Pope John Paul II Award, given annually to a layperson or permanent deacon who exhibits inspirational examples of Christian stewardship, an outstanding record of volunteer service, a high moral character and exemplary values.

Andonie’s outreach efforts have impacted a dizzying number of Catholic causes, including Catholic Charities, Our Lady of Holy Cross College, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the Pontifical Mission Societies, the Rebuild Center, the Serra Club, Ozanam Inn, Closer Walk Ministries, Family Life Apostolate, WLAE and Chateau de Notre Dame. He will receive the PJPII award at the Catholic Foundation’s Nov. 8 dinner at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.

“My only ‘hobby’ is work. I do it for selfish reasons,” Andonie insisted humbly. “I would go totally insane if I couldn’t stay busy, and I figure as long as God’s given me good health and my mind is still good, I’ve got to use it for good.”

Medical calling came early

Raised in a hardscrabble New Orleans neighborhood on Dryades Street, Andonie began cobbling together part-time jobs as a student at St. Alphonsus School in order to help support his mother, aunt and two sisters after his father abandoned the family. During the summer months, he would supplement his paper route income by selling shoes and working as an exterminator. But Andonie zeroed in on his true career goal at age 5, after someone gave him a mock doctor’s kit.

“From that moment, I said, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor.’ That was it,” Andonie said. “The only time I wavered from that was in my junior and senior year in high school – I thought about going to the seminary and being a priest.”

Throughout his formative years, though, people would continually remind Andonie that going to medical school was “impossible” because his family could never afford it.

“The more they told me that I couldn’t, the more my mother said, ‘God’s gonna fix it!’” said Andonie, noting that his mother’s prediction came true when he was chosen as the sole recipient of a full scholarship to Loyola University the night before his graduation from Redemptorist High.

Andonie went on to attend LSU Medical School in New Orleans, paying his way by performing medically related tasks such as drawing blood and being a surgical scrub nurse.

A specialty emerges

A two-year residency caring for maternity patients at St. Vincent’s Infant Home – a Catholic home for unwed mothers in the Irish Channel – sealed Andonie’s desire to be an OB-GYN. At St. Vincent’s, Andonie began dabbling in hypnosis as a means of easing the pains of natural childbirth – to give willing mothers-to-be an alternative to general anesthesia, which at the time was the standard practice for 98 percent of maternity patients and the nation’s leading cause of death among pregnant women. Later, in the mid-1960s, Andonie learned of a new procedure called an epidural from a pair of “very, very progressive” anesthesiologists while caring for maternity patients at Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base in Kentucky.

“When I came back to New Orleans I was the only guy in Louisiana doing (epidurals),” said Andonie, who initially offered the service free of charge due to its limited availability.

Miracle of childbirth

Over the course of his 45-year medical career, Andonie delivered more than 10,000 babies, many that he considers to be “true miracle cases.” One of those patients – a mother whom Andonie helped in the delivery of a healthy baby after she had lost eight late-term pregnancies – named her newborn “Jack,” in gratitude to her physician.

“My mother instilled in me a very strong Catholic faith, and during my time of practice, I always knew that physicians treat, but God heals,” Andonie said.

Another of Andonie’s “miracle cases” was the time he was able to salvage a small portion of a patient’s remaining Fallopian tube after the tube had ruptured during an ectopic – or “tubal” – pregnancy.

After praying about the woman’s situation, Andonie refrained from doing the standard hysterectomy and called her husband into the operating room to get his permission to insert a piece of sterile plastic tubing inside his wife’s Fallopian tube and stitch together as many pieces of damaged tissue as possible. Three months later, Andonie performed a repeat surgery to remove the plastic tube and observed that the woman’s Fallopian tube – albeit just a third of its original length – looked good.

“I told the couple, ‘According to the literature, nobody can get pregnant with a third of a tube.’ Well, she went on to have three babies. She had three babies on one third of a repaired tube! That’s a miracle!” Andonie said. “That’s not me; that’s not my surgery; those were actually miracles. God wanted that woman to have children. Period.”

Serial volunteer

A daily communicant and an extraordinary minister of holy Communion in his home parish of St. Edward the Confessor, Andonie is a Knight Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. He has received some of the highest honors in the Catholic Church, including the Order of St. Louis Medallion as a parishioner of St. Clement of Rome; the Pope John Paul II Papal Honor Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, also at St. Clement; Our Lady of Holy Cross College’s Spes Unica Award; and Loyola’s Integritas Vitae Award.

Of all the volunteer hours he has logged on behalf of archdiocesan causes, he said his most gratifying accomplishment was helping to found the Asociación Cristo Sana Clinica de la Mujer, a free clinic in Granada, Nicaragua, established by Christ the Healer (Christo Sana) offering free OB-GYN services. Andonie raised $250,000 for the effort, promising donors that every dollar would go to the poor and not to administrative overhead.

“I got hooked. I got really hooked,” said Andonie of his biannual mission trips to serve Nicaragua’s poor and provide them with medical care.

Andonie also counts his advocacy on behalf of the homeless at Ozanam Inn among his biggest accomplishments. After Hurricane Katrina, he encouraged the dean of the LSU Medical School to reopen the general practice clinic at Ozanam; another phone call to the dean of the LSU Dental School resulted in a program in which Ozanam’s homeless are taken by bus to the dental school for free dental services, then taken back to the CBD.

Andonie, a father of three and grandfather of six who celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary last June with his wife Priscilla Greenland, is also a familiar face at the LSU Health Sciences Center Foundation, the LSU Board of Supervisors, the Health Education Authority of Louisiana and Goodwill Institute Hospice. In 1997, the rabid Tiger fan donated 13,000 pieces of LSU sports memorabilia to a Baton Rouge museum that bears his name, but he is quick to point out that the university is not just about athletics.

“It’s simple: Had it not been for the LSU system of education, I would have never been able to get my education and my MD,” Andonie said. “It’s a Carnegie I research institution, which means it’s ranked in the top 2 percent in the country among 3,500 universities,” he said.

“LSU is thought of much more highly outside of the state of Louisiana than (in) Louisiana.”

Beth Donze can be reached at [email protected].