Death of nationally renowned physician is ‘a big loss for . . . the Wichita community’

Susan Wade was working for a large medical organization in 1991 when she was recruited to be the office administrator for a new Wichita ophthalmology practice called Grene Vision Group.

She remembers her father asking her why she would want to leave and work for a sole practitioner.

The answer was because that practitioner was the especially charismatic Bruce Grene.

“People are just drawn to him. He’s that guy,” Wade said. “He has a presence about him . . . that’s big, and he’s also so kind. You just could feel it. I don’t even know how to explain it.”

Grene died Oct. 3 at age 68 after what his obituary called “a long and determined battle with Parkinson’s disease.”

Though the disease ended his career well before it ended his life, Grene left a professional legacy both locally and nationally, and friends say the way he handled his illness continues to be inspiring.

“I kind of expected him to crumble,” said longtime friend Ed LeClair, who now lives in Vermont.

That’s because before the disease, Grene seemed to have everything: looks, intelligence, wit and wealth.

“The guy was a bit of a Greek god,” LeClair said.

The two met when they were in their early 20s and were at a party where they were interested in the same girl. They made a bet over her.

“However, I had the advantage at the time of knowing she was my wife” LeClair said.

The next day, Grene called to apologize, but he added, “Anybody that can pull a joke like that, I gotta know who you are.”

They became friends and at one point opened a gym, Serious Training Systems, together.

LeClair said Grene “corralled, urged, threatened, coerced . . . and teased” him into going to business school “so he would have a confidant for all his business ventures.”

“He wrote quick business plans. He was constantly bouncing ideas off me.”

LeClair refers to them as Grene’s meteors.

“Sometimes he did things that would blaze with glory and then flame out.”

Rick Shrader met his “completely loyal and generous friend” in medical school.

While everyone else was struggling to keep up with course work, Shrader said, Grene took a job working all night at an emergency room four times a week.

He said Grene had “an amazing sort of level of energy.”

“I’ve never known anyone like him, that’s for sure.”

The two began their careers at the Eye Clinic of Wichita.

“He wanted to do his own thing, which was more energetic than the rest of us,” Shrader said.

Eventually, Shrader and another physician convinced the other Eye Clinic partners to join Grene’s practice.

“We decided we liked his idea.”

Wade was Grene Vision Group’s ninth employee. By the time she left the practice, there were 450 employees, including 41 doctors at 26 sites.

“He was a visionary,” she said of Grene. “He did not really care about money. He really just wanted to put together a system that brought everybody together.”

Wade said Grene “was a big acronym guy.”

TEFTEF was a favorite. It stood for total eye care for the entire family.

Today, a private equity group owns the practice.

Wade said things changed after Grene retired.

“The person who made everybody want to charge up the hill wasn’t there anymore,” she said. “Everybody wanted to be their best because of who he was.”

‘Sidekick farmer’

Grene was visiting San Diego and learning laser eye surgery techniques from a friend when he and his future wife first saw each other across a room.

“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as love at first sight,” Mary Grene said.

That’s what they felt, though, she said. The next morning as they went for a jog, it began raining, and Grene said they ducked into a coffee shop where they sat and talked and read the paper “like we’d known each other for our whole life.”

The two eventually married and moved to an Andover farm where they raised all kinds of animals.

“He was my sidekick farmer,” Mary Grene said.

The La Crosse native had lived across the state but settled in Wichita after doing a corneal transplant fellowship at Harvard.

“He was such a tender soul,” Mary Grene said. “He truly cared for people and animals.”

Though Shrader called Grene a superb and generous colleague, he said working with such a high-energy individual could be stressful.

“There were times we wanted to kill each other,” Shrader said.

“He was always coming up with new ideas.”

Shrader said he and others would then have to determine if an idea was good enough for all of them to invest their money in it.

Grene’s greatest accomplishment aside from his practice was “the commercialization of an artificial tear that we developed along with a company called Allergan,” he told The Eagle upon his retirement in 2014.

“We took a formula to Allergan. It went on to become the largest-selling artificial tear in the world, and we touched a lot of people’s lives by doing that. We had an impact on how a lot of doctors viewed dry eye. I feel like I made a difference.”

LeClair said Grene’s mother gave him a larger world view, not with the idea of being a dilettante but with the thought of learning and then committing to something he was passionate about.

He said Grene’s brother, Doug — whom he called the consummate 1960s hippie — taught him “you don’t actually have to play by the rules all the time,” which LeClair sees as a factor that allowed him to go and do out-of-the-box things.

Grene would alternate between having laser vision and then looking at how it would affect others, LeClair said.

“He so valued his friendships.”

LeClair said he saw his friend try to make the most of each stage of his disease, much of which was possible thanks to Mary Grene.

She called her husband a “unique human being.”

“It’s just a big loss for me and the Wichita community.”