When Allen Forney started work as an orderly at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in May 1973, he wasn’t imagining a lifelong commitment. His goal was to become a certified public accountant, and the hospital gig was simply a means to make ends meet in the meantime.

But the work at Johns Hopkins took hold of him. Fifty years on, Forney is now one of the hospital’s longest-serving, best-known employees, currently working as a surgical technician alongside urologist-in-chief Mohamad Allaf and leading training of all minimally invasive surgery technicians in the hospital. Throughout the decades, Forney has trained hundreds of technicians, nurses, fellows and residents — people who have either passed through or planted their careers here.

A few years ago, he won the Urology Allied Health Teaching Award — an honor normally reserved for surgeons, but in this case, residents and fellows made the case for Forney.

The soft-spoken 72-year-old, who maintains a trace of a Southern accent, is known for keeping a cool head and creating a calm atmosphere in the operating room, sometimes pointedly breaking tension with a joke. “I try to bring a sense of relaxation and make sure everybody’s happy,” he says. 

Over time, Forney says he’s seen a gradual softening of the once-rigid hierarchy that separated doctors, nurses and technicians. “We all had to work for that, but now we have it — mutual respect for everyone working as a team,” he says.

In recent years, Forney has traveled internationally several times with Allaf to help launch robotic urology programs in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Hong Kong. In the latter city, “we were treated like rock stars,” Forney says, with limousines and five-star hotels.

AN UNEXPECTED CAREER

Born in the small town of Marion, North Carolina, Forney landed in Baltimore in 1966, living with his uncle. He served two years in the Army, including time in Korea, then through the GI Bill enrolled in community college in Baltimore with his ambition of becoming an accountant.

That path changed when two friends, brother and sister Willie Brooks and Katherine Yates — who both worked at The Johns Hopkins Hospital — encouraged him to apply there.

“And that’s what I did. And I’ve been here ever since,” Forney says.

He was only 22 when he entered the hospital’s halls as an orderly, having narrowly missed the window for surgical technician training. He took up the training the following year, which he now describes as “tough — a crash course of two years of knowledge crammed into six months.”

Forney has since worked in operating rooms across the hospital — in neurology, cardiology, orthopaedics, plastic surgery and pediatrics. But he spent most of his time, from the late 1970s through 2005, working with then-Chief of Surgery John Cameron, who Forney describes as “very vocal in the operating room.” During that time, Cameron famously mastered the Whipple procedure to treat pancreatic cancer.

Forney was the hospital’s first certified sterilization supervisor, and he scrubbed in on the first surgery in the Weinberg Center when it opened in 1999. Also in the 1990s, he was among the first surgical technicians in the nation to work with robot-assisted surgery, including the debut of the famous da Vinci surgical system. He assisted with the hospital’s first robotic gallbladder surgery and later expanded to robotic prostate surgeries.

Among those Forney trained at the hospital was his future wife, Mary, who became a nurse at Johns Hopkins. The two met in 1979 and wed in 1990, today sharing a home in New Freedom, Pennsylvania. Forney has six children and four grandchildren.

Though Mary retired from Johns Hopkins a few years ago, Forney has stayed on. He originally intended to retire in August 2023, he says — before he learned that a fellowship would be named in his honor.

“I’ve got to be here to meet the first fellow who receives it,” Forney explains.

In July, the Brady Urological Institute of The Johns Hopkins Hospital celebrated the Stephanie Walker and Allen Forney Minimally Invasive and Robotic Surgery Fellowship, a renaming of a decades-old fellowship for Forney along with Walker, a retired operating room nurse.

When Forney attended that ceremony at the hospital, several old friends showed up in support. They included Willie Brooks, the friend who introduced him to Johns Hopkins, and William Isabelle, a retired Johns Hopkins nurse — two people Forney considers his brothers.

“You know, Hopkins becomes like a family,” he says. “You have some lifelong friends, and then other friendly faces where you pass in the hall saying hi. There’s camaraderie like you would not believe here.”