On Monday, OCH Regional Medical Center opened its new Breast Health and Imaging Center near the hospital with a ceremony dedicating the facility to a doctor who hasn’t seen a patient in almost seven years.
The center features a plaque honoring Dr. Steve Parvin, who spent 35 of his 42 years as a surgeon at OCH before retiring in December 2011.
Sherry Lightsey worked with Parvin for all 35 years, while Dr. Travis Methvin worked with him for just six months. Yet both agree: Dedicating the new breast center to Parvin was the obvious choice.
“I can’t think of anyone who has done more for women with breast cancer than Dr. Parvin, at least not in North Mississippi,” said Lightsey, who served as Parvin’s office manager when OCH first opened a dedicated space for breast care in 2006, mainly at Parvin’s gentle, but persistent insistence.
“I can’t tell you how ahead of the curve he was on that,” said Methvin. “I came here from St. Louis and it was still a very fragmented system, even there. You had a doctor to see you where you had your mammogram. Then you went to another doctor to read your mammogram. Then you go to another. This is the first in the state, as I understand it, that encompasses everything in one place.”
Parvin is remembered not only for the “one-stop shop” approach to breast care, but for pushing for digital mammography at a time when almost every hospital relied on analog methods.
Today, Parvin said, the breakthroughs in breast cancer medicine are in treatment, but when he first became a surgeon in 1971, the biggest challenge in the field was diagnosis.
“In 1971, mammography was in its infancy and pretty crude, quite honestly,” Parvin said. “Before mammography, the women we saw almost always came to us with advanced symptoms of breast cancer.”
Because doctors could rarely diagnose cancers when they were small, the treatment for cancer at the time seems almost primitive by today’s standards.
“You went straight to surgery before even knowing if the lump was malignant, what we called then an ‘open biopsy,'” Parvin said. “If it was cancer, usually you preformed a mastectomy, removing not only the breast but also the lymph nodes under the arm. It wasn’t pretty, and it meant a lot of suffering.”
Specializing in breast care
Parvin, who grew up in Starkville and got his medical training in the Navy, began his career as a general surgeon. But in 1977, after leaving the Navy and returning to his hometown, he began to see more breast cancer patients.
“I always had an interest in breast care,” he said. “I did a lot of breast work as a general surgeon. It became apparent to me that if I was going to do this right, I had to specialize. When I started, breast surgery was almost always mastectomies, which is pretty straight-forward. But when you’re trying to save the breast, it becomes much more complicated. You need more training, so that’s when I began to really focus on that.”
Parvin started devoting himself full-time to breast care in the late 1990s. After a few years, he was convinced the hospital needed to invest in the latest advance in mammography — digital machines.
“It was like night and day,” Parvin said. “With analog mammography, all the images came to you as x-rays. They were hard to read and the images were not very good. But with digital mammography, you can pull up the images on a monitor. They are sharper. As a result, you can identify much smaller abnormalities, sometimes just a few millimeters in size.”
Parvin convinced the OCH Board to invest in a digital mammography machine in 2000.
“I have to give them credit, too,” Parvin said. “I think there was a hospital in Jackson that had one and I think there may have been one or two on the coast. There were, at most, a handful of them in the state. It wasn’t inexpensive, either. … It’s made a big difference in our ability to diagnose breast cancer in its earliest stages. When I started, breast cancer was pretty much a death sentence. Now, the five-year survival rate for stage 1 cancer is something like 95, 97 percent. That’s pretty good.”
Bedside manner
Parvin, 78, is remembered not only as the driving force behind establishing the hospital’s breast care center and advocating for digital mammography, but for what is referred to as his “bedside manner.”
That, said Lightsey, is of no small importance. Lightsey should know: She is a two-time breast cancer survivor.
“He’s probably the most compassionate doctors I’ve ever known,” said Lightsey, who turned to Parvin to perform a partial mastectomy for her cancer in 2009. “He’s truly interested in the person. Having faced cancer twice myself, I can’t tell you how important it was knowing that he was standing there with me. I knew it was going to be OK.”
Even though they worked together for just a few months, Methvin said he considers Parvin a mentor.
“One of the things about being a surgeon is that you can always learn if you are willing to listen,” Methvin said. “I learned a lot from Dr. Parvin, even in just six months. I’m a better doctor because of that.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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