COUNCIL AWARD
I excelled in school, finished high school in four years
and hit McGill for my undergrad at 17. I was the first
person in my family to go to university.
Q: You came to family practice through a rather circuitous route.
A: After graduating from McMaster, I started residency
in internal medicine at U of T, but after two years decided it wasn’t for me and left. I felt there was too much
emphasis on the disease and not on the patient. I had
an independent licence so I joined a family practice in
Ajax as a GP where they delivered babies without OB
backup.
I did my CCFP through the practise ready route in
2006.
Q: Why do you choose to deliver babies?
A: Delivering babies is fun. It’s such an enormously
gratifying and privileged moment to bring a new life
into the world. Unfortunately, things can go wrong on
occasion and I’ve been involved in some of those cases,
but that’s still greatly outweighed by the joy of caring
for that family as a unit and watching them grow.
It also has some technical aspects which I like and a bit
of an adrenalin rush that I would not get otherwise.
Q: Tell us about your humanitarian work overseas.
A: I spent two weeks in Haiti after the earthquake
in January 2010. St. Joseph’s Hospital put together
a medical team to help. What those women had to
put up with in terms of labour and delivery was just
heart-wrenching. It was just the most horrific conditions I can ever imagine having a baby under. They had
very few supplies. Mothers were dying and babies were
dying because they didn’t have basic necessities. There
were no kind words, no res X