While doctors typically relocate often early in their careers, there comes a time when the roots they have laid down tend to keep them anchored in one place. Not so in the case of Mark Heulitt, MD. After 26 years at Arkansas Children’s Hospital and after raising two children in Little Rock with Candy, his wife of 37 years, he pulled up anchor and moved to Memphis.
On July 1, Baptist Memorial Health Care announced Heulitt as medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Spence and Becky Wilson Baptist Children’s Hospital. A December opening is scheduled for the new, 12-bed PICU. It will come nearly two years after the opening of the Children’s Hospital’s 10-bed emergency department.
“I had done a lot in Arkansas,” Heulitt said, “and I was starting to wonder what I wanted to do to the end of my career. This was an opportunity to come somewhere and build something where there was a need and a great institution to go to. I really wanted to come somewhere and do something significant.”
The new PICU is the next step in the evolution of what started as a pediatric hospital adjacent to Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women.
“To do what they wanted, they needed to start to have a pediatric intensive care unit to support both the emergency room as well as the inpatient service,” Heulitt said.
“One of the things that brought me here was the vision that I saw in people and the desire to build this, to build a children’s hospital where we could meet the needs of all these children. But it’s a difficult task because it takes an investment of time, money and effort. It’s quite challenging.”
Growing up in northern New Jersey just outside New York City, Heulitt was surrounded by architects and builders. His father had an architectural business, and his mother was among the family members who helped out. But Heulitt sought a different path.
“I’m the black sheep of the family,” he said. “Pretty much everyone from grandparents down to brothers, everybody was always in construction. I was the first one to go into medicine.”
Heulitt made his career choice early on. His parents have a photo of him at about age 3 carrying a doctor’s bag. He was academically oriented as a youngster, but he was also athletic enough to win a state championship in wrestling in high school.
After majoring in biology at Washington & Jefferson College, he entered medical school at Far Eastern University in the Philippines. At the end of his first year there, he married Candy, who joined him in Manila.
“I had always been involved in mission work,” he said, “so my wife and I had the opportunity to go to the Philippines and I could do medical school at the same time and we could do mission work. It was an opportunity for both of us to go away somewhere and be just her and I. I’ve never regretted it. It was the best thing we ever did.”
He did his residency at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt in New York, and during his year as chief resident he was exposed to what was then a new specialty, pediatric intensive care. He did fellowships at Duke and Texas Southwestern in Dallas and emerged as a neonatologist and pediatric intensivist.
“I always tell people the reason I went into pediatrics is I’m a kid at heart and I could get away with playing with toys and kids to any age,” he said. “I just love kids, I love pediatrics. Children survive stuff that adults could never survive. They’re a miracle.”
For Heulitt, the most difficult aspect of having a love for children is caring for those who don’t make it.
“Being in the PICU, children have a history and parents will bring pictures,” he said. “Obviously we do very well in the pediatric ICU and have an excellent survival rate. But it’s always tragic to any of us when we lose a child, and it’s especially tragic when we lose a child where something can be preventable.
“I always say the worst thing I ever hear from a parent is ‘if only I would have known.’ We couldn’t save the child from a medical aspect, but they shouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.”
The Heulitts’ son, Jay, is a urologist, and their daughter, Eileen, has an architectural degree and works for Walmart Corporate designing children’s clothes.
“My son is in Seattle doing a fellowship in robotics and will come back to Little Rock and will be from what I understand the only fellowship-trained robotics person in urology in Arkansas. I don’t know why he became a surgeon and not a pediatrician,” Heulitt said with a smile. “I think his mother dropped him on his head when he was younger and I didn’t know about it.”
As for Eileen’s career choice, Heulitt said, again with a smile, “Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. But she loves what she does. I’m very proud of both of my children. They’ve done very, very well.”
Heulitt and Candy swim about 10 miles a week, he said, in preparation for a 2.4-mile ocean race every year in South Carolina. They also do ballroom dancing together.”
They have an 800-acre farm in Arkansas, where Heulitt loves to hunt and fish. Candy, a speech pathologist, will partake in trout fishing but otherwise doesn’t share her husband’s passion for duck hunting and deer hunting.
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