Dr. Jonathan Ringo fuses heart and hi-tech at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital
T
he first thing you might notice about Dr. Jonathan Ringo, the charismatic South African-accented, yarmulke-clad president and COO of Baltimore ’s Sinai Hospital is his ID badge: It simply reads “Physician.” Because even as he oversees a staff of close to 5,000 employees and deals with everything from contract negotiations to overhauling patient-care protocol in Maryland’s largest teaching and research hospital, he’s first and foremost a healer with a huge heart, and still takes shifts on the ward as an OB/GYN in Sinai’s labor and delivery unit.
And if anyone knows a hospital from the other side of the bed, it’s Dr. Ringo. As a six-year-old growing up in a Johannesburg suburb, following an uncontrollable nosebleed, he was ultimately diagnosed with a rare type of blood cancer known as acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). At the time, with the prognosis for survival of that type of leukemia less than five percent, the doctors told his parents, “There’s nothing we can do for him — just take him home and keep him comfortable.”
But the Ringos were undaunted. With no treatment available in South Africa at that time, they contacted various medical centers around the world. The one facility willing to chance treatment was the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. While local medical personnel thought the Ringos were being cruel and unrealistic by taking their little boy out of the country to die, they knew they couldn’t sit back until every option was tried. In Boston, Jonathan was given experimental chemotherapy — mega-doses of powerful chemo cocktails, even though at that point there was an active debate about whether to treat the cancer at all because the feeling was that it wouldn’t make a difference. But both six-year-old Jonathan and his dedicated staff of doctors were fighters, and today, at 49, he’s one of the oldest survivors of pediatric AML.
Being in and out of hospitals for three years on brutal chemotherapy regimens made Dr. Ringo especially sensitive to the importance of compassionate as well as quality medical care.
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