Randal Hundley, MD’79, retired from treating patients as a cardiologist in 2008, but he has not stopped working or maintaining an active schedule.
He has continued employment as a part-time director with Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield and is honing his skills as a violinist after starting to play the instrument in his early 50s. Keeping busy is a trait he developed early in life.
Having grown up in Star City, a small Arkansas town located in the Mississippi Delta, he became interested in science around the fourth grade.
“My biological father was a physician,” Hundley said. “Although we grew up in the same small town, he and I barely knew each other, although I suspect his influence contributed to my interest in medicine. I had a wonderful stepfather. When I was 16, I started working as an orderly in a hospital in Pine Bluff about 25 miles away. I felt like that was a great entry to the profession. I made up beds, gave enemas and pushed stretchers.”
The job gave him a teamwork perspective.
“It just made me see how everybody is important,” he said. “It gave me an appreciation for the whole team. I have a lot of respect and trust for nurses, and if they trust you well enough to feel comfortable, they know they can safely share their valuable perspectives, any time of night or day.”
He finished his undergraduate degree at Hendrix College, a small liberal arts institution in Conway, Arkansas, and then was accepted at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
“I feel like I’ve been the luckiest guy in the world,” Hundley said. “After Vanderbilt, I did my fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. How did that happen? It’s probably because of Dr. Roger Des Prez, who was the chief of Medicine at the VA hospital in Nashville. He was pretty close to the chief of medicine at Brigham and Women’s. He wrote a very nice letter. Here I was this kid from Star City, not only going to Vanderbilt but now going to Harvard for cardiology.”
He then joined a cardiology practice in Little Rock, Arkansas.
“I was the third member of a group that basically grew before I left to about 25,” he said. “I feel kind of bad that I practiced for only 23 years because so many people keep going until much later. I did interventional cardiology. I loved treating heart attacks and the excitement of getting someone to the cath lab urgently to open a vessel.”
For personal health reasons, Hundley transitioned to a career with Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield.
“It was an incredible opportunity to do something else intellectually stimulating, and so I worked full time up until 2019. Then I went part time,” he said.