Dr. Terri Bunch turned in her bed to face her visitor.
“You know I’m very comfortable with you,” she said, “but if you start to blubber, you’re out the door.”
And then she lifted her finger and pointed at the door, causing her friend and co-worker to laugh. Bunch smiled, satisfied.
“She just had a sense of humor that never ended,” recalled Debbie Ringdahl, nurse practitioner in pediatric neurology at Shands at UF.
A few days later, on Sept. 7, Bunch, a UF pediatric neurologist, died after a three-year battle with breast cancer. She was 65.
Bunch was born in Knoxville, Tenn., but left her humble beginnings to attend the University of California, Berkeley. She later moved to the United Kingdom, where she studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and met her husband, Guy Carter. She lived there for 20 years.
Colleagues and co-workers can’t talk about Bunch without smiling. They remember her as an intelligent, humorous adventurer who would do anything to make her patients feel at ease, even when introducing herself.
“Dr. Bunch,” she would say, “as in a bunch of bananas.”
After returning from England, Bunch began her residency in adult neurology at UF, but it was during a three-month rotation in the pediatric division that she found her passion.
So Bunch, undeterred by the fact that she was now in her mid 40s, finished her residency and began a new residency with the pediatric division.
“She was not ever going to quit,” Ringdahl said. “She saw something ahead of her that she wanted to do, and she did it. Nothing ever got in her way.”
Bunch then practiced in Savannah, Ga., and St. Petersburg before returning to Gainesville in 2010. She brought along toys, chairs and stickers from her private practice in Savannah and shared them with the pediatric neurology division at Shands at UF, hoping to create a more child-friendly atmosphere.
But Dr. Paul Carney, chief of the division, said she brought more than material possessions.
“If I ever needed words of wisdom, if I ever needed help, I would turn to her,” he said. “She was not only intelligent, she was wise.”
While numerous chemotherapy treatments changed Bunch’s physical appearance throughout her short three years in the pediatric neurology division, her outlook on life that never changed.
Ringdahl said Bunch kept her patients and staff laughing.
“She’d take her wig off in the office and scratch her head, then put her wig back on backward or sideways,” she said, laughing along with her co-workers.
Carter said her enthusiasm for life brought her through the daily nausea and pain that her treatments caused.
There were high points, he said. In April, doctors told Bunch that her PET scan showed her last chemotherapy treatment had stopped the cancer from spreading.
“She came home, and we danced around the car,” Carter said.
But Bunch’s health began to deteriorate over the summer, and she stopped going to work near the end of July.
She spent her last few days with family, reading notes that her colleagues wrote for her and snuggling with her Chihuahua, Miss Kitty.
Bunch is survived by her husband, Guy Carter; one son, Chris (Louise) Wells; one grandson, Arthur Wells; and two sisters, Fran Henriques and Teresa Leveque.
Carter said there will be a void now that she is gone.
“She was the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” he said. “That, coupled with her love of life, just made her extremely special.”
For the past three years, Dr. Terri Bunch worked as a pediatric neurologist at Shands at UF, becoming a beloved member of the hospital staff.
