Life on a special mission comes to an end for Beaufort’s beloved Dr. Tony Bush | Opinion
Beaufort lost one of its brightest lights this month with the passing of Dr. Tony Bush.
He was known as a Beaufort surgeon for 26 years, a two-term City Council member and deacon at the Baptist Church of Beaufort.
He treated inmates at 12 county jails across the state — long after he’d gone into jails with his guitar to lead devotionals.
But a light in a medical clinic in the boondocks of Haiti may best tell his story.
It was on the first of what would be 54 mission trips to the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission. He had taken enough basic supplies? to do six surgeries and planned to set up shop in a dirty, dark storage room — until he found the light.
Beaufort nurse anesthetist Carmen Marflak, who was part of most of Bush’s medical mission trips, said they took a headlight and the battery out of a pickup truck, hung the light from the ceiling, cabled it to the battery and made it bright enough to do their surgery.
From that, a surgical wing would eventually be created, with equipment and supplies donated by Beaufort Memorial Hospital and hospitals in Hampton, Walterboro and Hilton Head Island.
Over the years, many more doctors and health care professionals from Beaufort would make trips to the Haiti mission. Bush also took high schoolers with him to show them what service to others looks like, and to interest them in the health-care field. Marflak said 17 of them pursued it as a career.
He typically did three or four 2-week trips per year, treating 100 to 300 patients in the clinic and doing 75 to 100 procedures.
It wasn’t easy. One time, his surgery was interrupted so they could get on the last plane out before service shut down due to civil unrest. Another time, he flew in on a private plane with no brakes to get in first after an earthquake. Yet another time, leaving required a 15-hour trip in the back of a pickup truck.
“He wanted to be the hands and feet of Jesus,” Marflak said.
He focused on Haiti because it is known as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, she said.
His first mission trip was in the summer of 1977 to the Gaza Strip, with his wife, Beaufort native Patricia Lubkin Bush, a nurse, and their two children, Clay, then 8, and Dolly, then 3.
Bush shared stories about early trips throughout the Middle East at a church gathering, he recalled those days and the Muslims he met kindly.
“You have to admire their moral lifestyle,” he said, “their supervision of their young people and that they don’t drink or smoke.”
He was an undergraduate mechanical engineer who loved to work on Volkswagens. He helped build his own home, built the dock, dug the ditches and constantly tinkered in his shop.
As a member of City Council, Bush had so little to say in meetings that Mayor David Taub dubbed him “loquacious councilman Bush.”
Bush’s retort? “There’s no shortage of words on our council.”
He mailed personal notes to more than 1,000 registered voters and he was the top vote-getter on the ballot in his two elections.
Patricia Lubkin Bush said if you saw him in a Volkswagen Beetle, he was going to church. In a VW van, he was playing. In a Cadillac, he was on vacation.
His days stretched from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. And he did it all amid a personal fight with Type 1 diabetes.
Over the last year, he had lost almost all of his eyesight and was using a walker, yet he never complained.
“He never quit living,” said his physician, Dr. Clark Trask. “He never stopped until he decided to stop.”
He had a diabetes-related infection that would have required a foot to be amputated. He was 87. “He was ready to see the Lord,” his wife Patricia Lubkin Bush said, “and we were all at peace with that.”
They brought him home from the hospital and a day later, a special light in Beaufort was gone.
This story was originally published September 15, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Life on a special mission comes to an end for Beaufort’s beloved Dr. Tony Bush | Opinion."