Longtime obstetrician moving on from delivering babies
Published 10:00 am Tuesday, January 28, 2025
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After delivering multiple generations of babies, Dr. James Bendell is moving on from obstetrics.
Dr. Bendell has been delivering babies in LaGrange for over 25 years, having delivered somewhere between three and four thousand children.
“It’s been a wonderful, wonderful time,” Bendell said. “I’m at the point of my career where I’m delivering babies, of babies that I’ve delivered. So I’ve got several generations in the room, which is awesome.”
“Obstetrics is phenomenal, and it’s been really hard making the decision to stop delivering babies, but it’s also incredibly intense. It’s unscheduled, of course, as it would be so. So it takes a lot of time from the practice and from home,” Bendell explained.
Bendell said he had actually begun looking into moving on from obstetrics a few years ago but there weren’t enough obstetricians in town to do it safely.
“We’ve got several new providers in town and another one coming, all of whom are excellent. So it’s time to focus on gynecology, focus a little bit more on family, and just take some time to explore some new things,” Bendell said.
Bendell explained that the gynecology side of his practice has grown and they’ve gotten heavily into robotic surgery. The practice will now focus on women’s health, infertility, and surgeries.
With his time freed up from obstetrics, which had been a third of his time or more, it will allow him to focus on gynecologic services, inpatient services, women’s healthcare, prevention, menopause, surgeries and more specialized care.
Bendell said robotic surgery has been a focus of late, explaining that it’s not really a robot doing your surgery. It’s robotic-assisted surgery. When he does surgeries, he’s always in the room with the patient, the robot is just replacing his arms.
“It’s like playing a video game,” he said.
“The robot is a tool that gives us far better visualization. We’ve got beautiful 3D images that are magnified so we can see better. It gives us far better control. It gets rid of the inherent tremor and gives us far more precision in our actions and it also allows us to do a lot of the surgery using solutions other than tying and stretching tissue, so that results in a lot less pain,” Bendell said.
“The robot gives me far better access, and I can do far better surgery,” Bendell said. “We’re getting close to 1000 surgeries at this point, which is huge. We’ve had one patient stay overnight. All of the rest have gone home the same day. They recover very quickly. So it’s incredibly gratifying.”
Robotic assistance also extends surgeon’s careers. Surgery is a pretty intense physical procedure. Surgeons get into awkward positions that they need to hold for a long time, so it limits surgeons who physically can’t do the surgery anymore. Robotics has basically eliminated that, Bendell said.
Bendell said he is going to miss delivering babies though.
“I just love obstetrics. The relationship that you get to have with the patient, sharing in such a pivotal moment of the individual’s life, particularly the way it is here in LaGrange,” Bendell said.
“I know these people. I see them out on the streets … I’m the type of physician that I don’t believe in barriers between me and my patients. I embrace a relationship, and you know that they all become very special to me.”
“I’m still there when they get pregnant because I’m still doing fertility work … then I have to convince them that they have to come back to me after they have their babies,” he said.
“I’ll miss it terribly. But at the same time, I think that there are people that can do it just as well, if not better than me,” Bendell said.