Dr. Jeri Lantz was attending an American College of Physicians meeting a few years ago when one of the organization’s 143,000 members was commended for his community service.
She remembers appreciating the honoree’s contributions in earning the Oscar E. Edwards Memorial Award, “But I realized, oh, for heaven’s sake, Dr. Dallas really deserves that award.”
The American College of Physicians agreed. Apostolos Dallas, a Roanoke internal medicine physician whom colleagues describe as both the humblest and smartest man in the room, will accept the award in May during the organization’s gathering in Washington, D.C.
“I can tell you that of the national awards, this was our most competitive, and we had many qualified nominees with excellent domestic and volunteer accomplishments,” an organization spokeswoman said.
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When Lantz set out to compile a nominating application about her colleague at Carilion Clinic, she knew only a smidgen about Dallas’ community involvement, so she pumped him for information, which wasn’t easy. “Paul is kind of a humble guy,” she said.
She knew of his work with the Bradley Free Clinic and the Roanoke Greek Festival but learned more about his hand in the Roanoke Rescue Mission health clinic, the Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and medical drives for Pushchino, Russia, and his birthplace in a remote mountainous region in Greece, and a charity basketball game.
There’s probably more. Lantz said she could pull only so much out of him. The far easier part was having others write supporting letters, including an introductory one by Dr. Jon Sweet that noted: “Paul is an innovative, creative and tireless leader. ... He continues to be an outstanding model for his physician, resident and medical student colleagues in the valley.”
Dallas talked about the honor from his office in an older section of Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. The sheer size and multitude of plants, overwintering in the warmth of this small space, overshadow the man who brought them to life. His zeal for growing plants began with the gift of a cactus dish from his sister before he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in 1987.
“I thought if I can make this one grow, I’ll get some others and see if I can make it grow. So then I went kind of crazy,” he said. He’s a few hours short of a landscape horticulture degree.
Most of Dallas’ endeavors start the same way, with him planting a seed that blossoms into a community institution. In 1992, he decided to take internal medicine residents and students on Tuesdays to the Bradley Free Clinic to treat patients. It was a novel approach that no others were doing.
All these years later, residents still volunteer on Tuesday evenings. Their faces rotate, but Dallas’ is constant. He sees patients once a month now, and remains on the board.
“It’s kind of fascinating because the patients we see at the Bradley Free Clinic are actually the same type of patients we will see at our clinic and the hospital. It’s the same patient, it’s the same attending, the same residents, but people find it rewarding,” he said. “People are there because they want to be, not because it’s a job or part of their education. It feels more like what you want it to feel like, the cliché of giving back to the community.”
When Roanoke Rescue Mission director Joy Sylvester-Johnson approached Carilion Clinic for help in starting a free clinic to tend to people without any health care, she worried how Bradley Free Clinic might respond. Dallas smoothed the way by helping to launch it.
“He understood clearly how the mission clinic specifically for those who were homeless was not duplication, but a collaborative effort,” she said. Last year, the clinic delivered medical care valued at $3.5 million.
His impact is found with the Greek Festival that he helped to develop a decade ago from a one-day dinner at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. The festival has raised more than $200,000 for an array of local charities. Though not ordinarily a boastful man, Dallas brags about making the baklava. About 190 pans yielding 12,000 to 14,000 pieces are made in one weekend. He thinks if he pairs up with the right person — he has his eye on a vascular surgeon who’s machine-like in his repetitive precision — he can clock in as the fastest baklava maker at 10 minutes a pan, shaving five minutes off his average and 35 off others’ average time.
Yes, for him, everything is a competition. That flair drove him to create the Crockett Cup, a charity basketball game he created between residents and faculty that recruited University of Virginia and Virginia Tech coaches. More than $40,000 was raised to support the local Ronald McDonald House during his six years at the helm.
He also has paying jobs. He coordinates Carilion’s continuing medical education programs, sees patients a few days each week and teaches always. He’s an assistant professor and associate program director of internal medicine residency at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
Where does he find the time to volunteer?
“We make decisions about how we fit different things in our calendar based on how we value things,” he said. Take the average person, who plops down in front of the TV for four hours every night. Imagine using those 28 hours a week differently.
If he sounds like a doctor preaching to a patient as to how to work in more exercise, well, he is that. But he walks the talk.
As a first-year intern, he worked 100 hours a week. “That’s almost three full-time jobs, and yet I thought it was very important to learn more so I actually took courses at a local community college,” he said. “The following year when I was working 80 hours a week, I thought, ‘What do people do with all this extra time?’ ”
Dallas continues, too, to contribute to medicine. He recently came off an eight-year commitment to the American College of Physicians’ guideline panel that recommends how often women should get mammograms or men prostate tests. He’s now on another committee that will weigh what types of care and procedures benefit patients the most.
The organization’s honor recognizes the breadth and variety of Dallas’ work. When asked what he’s enjoyed most, he needed no time to answer.
“Do you enjoy the steak or the dessert most? They’re both good and both satisfying,” he said.
In volunteering, “there’s fellowship. You meet people, expand your horizons. Not everyone thinks the same, so your exchange ideas,” he said. “That’s one of the fun things about volunteering.”