Dr. Norman Lush was the kind of doctor who would take a call any hour of the day or night about a patient and still find time to help the causes he was dedicated to.
“Dad was up and gone right away if he was worried about any patient,” recalled his daughter, Nancy Lush, a school board psychologist.
“He was always on the go. He could be in the hospital for 24 to 36 hours if a patient was sick.”
Lush, described by a colleague in his obituary as “the father of neurology in Newfoundland and Labrador,” died Friday.
At visitation on the weekend, Nancy Lush says, she was deluged with stories from his colleagues before she even got out of the parking lot and into the funeral home.
“Everyone said he was the best to work with,” she said Monday. “All the people who went through, they all said positive things.”
Dr. Mark Stefanelli said Lush, Dr. Max House and Dr. J.C. Jacobs pioneered neurology in the province.
While Stefanelli was a resident, Lush — one of his mentors and teachers — trained him how to read an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that records electrical activity in the brain.
He marvelled Monday at Lush’s ability to read the EEGs efficiently and with pinpoint accuracy — at “Lush speed,” a term he now uses with his own residents.
When Stefanelli was a resident, and for much of Lush’s career, the EEGs were on paper.
“EEGs are really tough to read. … Norm probably, in his lifetime, read over 100,000 I would guess — just a huge number. EEGs, you have to sit there and agonize, because it’s looking at electrical activity of the brain,” Stefanelli said.
“I used to go through these things so painfully slow as a resident. I would go a page and a page and a page. I would take 40 minutes to go through an EEG and Norm would stop on a dime and he would say, ‘Did you see this?’ And I would say, ‘Gee, no, I missed that.’ He could just pick things up on that EEG almost uncannily at a speed that I would never even be able to register on the page in front of me (back then).”
Stefanelli said Lush was like that in life, too.
“I struggle just to run my practice every day. Norm not only ran his practice when there were just two or three neurologists in the province, he also had all this extra activity,” he said, referring to Lush’s work with various organizations.
He was often invited to Lush’s home and summer place and they became friends.
“He was such a friendly guy. He just basically, no matter who you were, he would always be kind to you and he just had a way of taking you in,” Stefanelli said.
“He was so good and so kind.”
Lush was a co-founder of The Hub — which provides employment for people with disabilities, and social and recreational facilities — as well as a founding member of the Wheelchair Sports Association. He was the 1993 president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association and an Order of Canada recipient.
- neurologist has combined his busy practice with an outstanding voluntary commitment to organizations that support and promote persons with disabilities,” states the Order of Canada citation for Lush, who received the honour in 2003.
“His whole aim was to do no harm and help as much as he could,” his daughter said.
Among his endeavours, he served as medical director for the Wheelchair Sports Association of Newfoundland and Labrador and its national counterpart, as well as the Newfoundland and Labrador division of the Canadian Paraplegic Association, and was a key organizer of the 1978 Canadian Games for the Physically Disabled, held in St. John’s.
But to his family, first and foremost he was a devoted dad and husband to Greta, who would have been his wife of 59 years had she not died a few months shy of their anniversary.
“It absolutely killed him when she died,” Nancy Lush said. “Everything stopped when she died. … He just missed Mom so much.”
Together they had been involved in getting The Hub going with several other dedicated volunteers.
On the Canadian Wheelchair Sports Association website, Dr. Robert Steadward — founding president of the International Paralympic Committee — wrote that Greta and Norman Lush in the early years of The Hub “served on the board, fundraised, lobbied government for core funding, scrubbed floors, spoke at service clubs, cleaned bathrooms, painted walls and encouraged their neighbours and friends to become involved.”
Nancy Lush said her parents’ devotion to various organizations serving children and people with disabilities originated from the loss of their son, who was born prematurely at seven months with medical challenges he could not overcome.
Lush played prominent roles at all the city’s hospitals — including being chief of neurology at the since-razed Grace General Hospital from the late1960s to late ’70s, and chief of staff and neurology at the Children’s Rehabilitation Centre for most of the ’70s.
He had a private practice in neurology until 2005, and his travelling clinics included Corner Brook, Clarenville, Grand Falls-Windsor and Gander.
Lush grew up in Harbour Grace and Gander, and met his wife while both were students at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He graduated from Dalhousie’s medical school and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital.
Nancy Lush described her father as a down-to-earth man who wore overalls as he woodworked, and loved laughing and telling jokes and playing poker with his buddies. He did not let class or income decide his social circle. His interests included growing grapes, which he gave away.
He loved entertaining. Nancy Lush recalled seeing a bus pull up outside their country home in the early 1980s, as he welcomed attendees from a national pharmaceutical convention who were unable to find a place to hold the closing gathering.
“The house was blocked with people,” she said.
Another time, he hosted the attendees from a neurological convention.
During a storm, he threw the house open to people who had been left without heat in power outages, and kept the woodstove stocked.
“His door was always open,” she said.
Dr. Norman Lush is survived by four daughters — Nancy Lush, Sandra Lush Simpson, Janet Lush Graham and Joanne MacDonald — and five grandchildren.
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