COUNCIL AWARD
University with no idea of what
I wanted to do. It wasn’t until I
got into my studies that I realized
I wanted to deal with people as
opposed to be sitting in an office.
Medicine seemed like a good fit.
It was challenging thing and also
involved dealing with people. I applied to medicine after two years of
university but didn’t get accepted.
Then I applied again after finishing my physiology degree and got
accepted at Queen’s.
Q: Why did you decide to
go New Zealand for your
internship?
A: I applied for an internship in
New Zealand because some of my
friends had gone there before and
liked it. About 10 per cent of our
class went to New Zealand. I spent
18 months in a hospital in Dunedin. I met my wife down there. We
worked together in the hospital.
She was a nurse in the intensive
care unit. We got married at the
end of my internship. After that,
I applied to a hospital in Sydney
to do another year of internship in
family practice. After three years
abroad, we decided to come back to
Canada in 1980.
Q: What is it like to practise in a
rural community?
A: In a rural community, we have
to do more on our own because
we don’t have specialists adjacent
to us. We don’t have a hospital in
our own community. It’s a more
independent style of practice. Also
with a smaller community you can
become part of the community.
Q: How did the Family Health
Team develop?
A: The initiative to apply for a
Family Health Team came from a
community group now called East
Wellington Community Services
and their volunteer board in 2005.
I was asked to join the steering
committee to develop our proposal.
At the time, we were down to
two or three doctors from seven due
to retirements and a doctor moving away. The Family Health Team
opened in May 2008. It covers two
communities jointly with an executive director and a board. We have
built two new clinics and with our
family health model, we are quite
attractive to new graduates.
We have nine doctors and I’m
the lead physician on the Family Health Team. Our two clinics
serve about 11,000 patients in
East Wellington. We do telemedicine and have a diabetes team, a
memory clinic, as well as nurses,
dieticians and mental health workers on staff.
Q: Tell us about the personal
health crisis you faced.
A: In 1986, a routine blood test
showed abnormal blood cells. The
diagnosis was acute leukemia. That
was a big problem. I was admitted
to hospital the next day and treated
at McMaster. The short version
is the chemotherapy in my case
worked. I was off work for nine or
10 months. When I was fully in
remission, I went back to work for
three months. But then a routine
follow up showed some of the cells
had come back. They were starting
to develop bone marrow transplants
at that time. In February 1988, I
received a transplant from a person
in Minnesota off the U.S. bone
marrow registry. It took a while to
recover but I’ve been very lucky.
That marrow has done me well and
I started back to work in January
1989. It was the first unrelated
bone marrow transplant in Canada
on an adult. The first was done on a
child in Ottawa the day before.
It was very fortunate for me
because I didn’t have many other
options at the time and I was young
and reasonably healthy.
Q: How did your illness affect
how you practised?
A: Hopefully, I was compassionate anyway but going through that
made me more knowledgeable
about what patients go through. It
was easier to talk to patients about
their illness. I knew I was lucky to
be treated in Ontario and a great
deal of money had been spent to
make me better and I felt in some
way that me working again and taking care of other people was a way
to return to the system that had
been so good to me.
As told to Prithi Yelaja. This interview
has been edited and condensed.
DIALOGUE • Issue 3, 2014
15