CASEY: Retired longtime dentist offers his medical equipment to Ukraine

Dr. John Eby, 78, shows off some of the dental equipment he acquired during 50 years of dentistry in Roanoke.

Retired dentist John Eby displays a vacuum suction machine located in the basement of his former family dentistry office on Brambleton Avenue. It's connected by pipe to two treatment rooms upstairs. Eby retired in June 2021, and since then he's tried to sell or give away his dental tools and equipment, but nobody here wants it. Now he's trying to donate it to Ukraine.

When you listen to Dr. John Eby talk about five decades practicing dentistry in Roanoke, one thing that comes across clearly is, he loved a career in family dentistry.

The soft-spoken retiree can wax poetic about one of his first patients, a little girl in the early 1970s. By the time Eby closed his practice on Brambleton Avenue, at age 76, almost two years ago, he was caring for that little girl’s daughter — and her grandchildren.

“Three generations,” Eby marveled wistfully during an interview at his former office Wednesday morning. More than one family in his practice fit that bill, he added.

The red-letter day was June 14, 2021. When he woke up that morning, he wasn’t anticipating retirement. But that morning, his visual focus seemed a little off (because of a cataract). He decided his patients deserved a dentist with sharper vision.

Eby and Pam Brooks, his trusted assistant for decades, more or less made the decision jointly. They shut down for good at the end of the day and retired with few regrets.

He kept the building, a standalone office he built in 1976 on a hill that overlooks Brambleton. Since then, it’s served as kind of a retirement “man-cave,” and it’s helped ease Eby’s transition from practitioner to retiree.

Now it’s time to sell the property, but there’s a minor problem. The ex-office is full of still-working, top-quality dental equipment that Eby accumulated over 50 years. It‘s old, and some of it’s analog — and much of 21st-century American dentistry is digital.

But “It’s not obsolete. It’s dated. It still works perfectly,” Eby said. Unfortunately, nobody here wants it.

“I can’t do anything unless I can get rid of this stuff,” Eby said. “And I have absolutely no interest in selling it on Ebay.”

First, Eby tried to sell the hardware to other dentists. He emailed a detailed list to practitioners all over the Roanoke Valley.

“This stuff was ready to go,” he said. Nobody expressed interest.

Then he tried to give it away to dental clinics, such as the Bradley Free Clinic, where Eby volunteered for 14 years. It accepted some unexpired dental office supplies.

But nobody wanted Eby’s Dental-Eze chairs, or his Panorex X-ray machine, or his autoclave (a high-tech oven that sterilizes dental tools). Some of those implements run off a compressed-air system in the basement that propulses them at 400,000 revolutions per minute. Every dental office has that kind of stuff.

The equipment works perfectly well and can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars if purchased new, Eby said. One piece — the analog panoramic X-ray unit, cost more than $13,000 in the 1970s.

It would be a tragedy to send that usable gear to a landfill, Eby said. But until early this month, that’s where it seemed destined.

Then Eby stumbled across a story in this newspaper about the Worldwide Friends Foundation, a nonprofit in Northern Virginia. (Originally, the article appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.)

The foundation and a farther-flung network of do-gooders was amassing scores of still-running but retired American ambulances to ship to Ukraine. Nearly two dozen of them came from Augusta County.

Ukraine needs ambulances because Russia invaded nearly a year ago. The Russian military’s been bombarding eastern Ukraine ever since, causing countless deaths and hundreds of billions in damages.

Ukrainian authorities have redeployed ambulances from western Ukraine, which has seen little fighting, to eastern Ukraine where the greatest need is. That left western Ukraine with an ambulance shortage. The American ambulances will be shipped to western Ukraine on a container ship, via Baltimore, Germany, and Slovenia.

Eby thought, why not fill a couple of those ambulances with aging but well-maintained dental equipment?

It’s a good idea. It’s not quite at the realization stage yet, but it’s closer to reality than it was three weeks ago. Meanwhile, the landfill is appearing more distant.

Eby found a website in the article, which led him to a phone number he called. It was answered by Kevin Dillard in Fredericksburg. Dillard dispatched an associate here in the valley, Robert Long, to Eby’s former office to check out the gear. Long was there Monday taking pictures.

Now Dillard and Long are trying to figure out which of the dental equipment could be useful in Ukraine and how to get it to the Eastern European nation intact.

That may be complex because Russia appears on the cusp of launching a major new offensive. Naturally, Eby doesn’t want to send a bunch of stuff there only to have it blown to smithereens. Sending it to a landfill would be much easier.

Thus, “it’s a bit premature to say it’s definitely going to Ukraine,” Eby cautioned. But at the least, people are thinking hard about how it could be useful there moving forward.

Although Eby never fought in a war, he served in the military. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve while studying at the Medical College of Virginia in the late 1960s in Richmond.

That’s where he met his wife, Pat Eby, who earned a nursing degree there. (He grew up in Dumfries; she was raised in Roanoke.)

They married three months before graduation in 1969. Then they had two years in Connecticut, where he served on active duty with the U.S. Navy Dental Corps.

Pat persuaded him to establish a practice in Roanoke after his term in the Navy was up. His first office was a rented storefront on Brambleton Avenue where East Coasters Cycling & Fitness is now. He built the new office five years later.

They raised two children. Their son, Justin, now lives in Huntsville, Alabama. Their daughter, Beth Bohr, still lives here. The initial tip for this story was a proud Facebook post she made about her dad’s effort to send his dental equipment to Ukraine.

Eby was working about three days a week by the time he called it quits in 2021. He reckoned he had 1,000 then-current patients. He never employed a dental hygienist. He performed all his patient cleanings by himself.

“My emphasis was prevention and teaching, rather than hands-on treatment,” he said. He spent the cleaning time educating his patients on best practices that would help keep him out of their mouths, rather than in it.

He called his career “a wonderful joyous ride.”

How many ex-dentists can say that?

Contact metro columnist Dan Casey at 981-3423 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter:@dancaseysblog.

Contact metro columnist Dan Casey at 981-3423 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter:@dancaseysblog.

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