Council award
Recently, we spoke to Dr. Stadnyk
Q: Why did you decide to become a family doctor
in northern Ontario?
A: I always wanted to work in northern Ontario. I was
interested in First Nations and I always enjoyed the
geography – the shields, rivers, lakes and forests. I didn’t
want to do family medicine in a city because I wanted
to do a broader range of things. I wanted to see emergency and inpatients along with office patients.
Q: Describe how your group’s model of daily
joint rounds benefits patients and promotes
bonding among colleagues.
A: We meet at 9 AM as a group in the conference room
with the nurses and occasionally a home care nurse or
a First Nations nurse. We discuss all the inpatients plus
anything they expect back through the emergency room
or anything challenging that’s happened. There’s a lot
of exchange of ideas – someone’s attended a conference and learned something new, they’ll share that with
the rest of the group. Then we go around and see the
patients on the ward.
If you don’t have that regular contact, you could
come in and see that orders have been changed on your
patient in the hospital and you’ll wonder why the heck
they did that. But when we meet like this, it’s obvious
why the person did what they did.
Q: What kinds of cases do you see?
A: Diabetes is really high. We have a lot of cardiac
disease and a fair bit of infectious disease. Injuries and
trauma are common especially during hunting season.
When I started, we used to deliver babies but that got
shifted to Little Current.
Q: Tell me about some of the patients you’ve
treated.
A: There was a man about 20 years ago who ran into a
wire while riding a snowmobile late at night, ripping
open his neck. When I went to get him at the bottom
of our ambulance ramp, I was quite certain he was dead
based on all the blood in the truck that brought him in
and because I couldn’t feel a pulse. We got him into our
resuscitation room, did the standard trauma life support
measures and he is still alive today.
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Dialogue Issue 3, 2015
Many of the most gratifying cases for me personally have had to do with helping patients with terminal
illnesses and also helping their families. A current case
involves a woman in her 60’s with an obvious lung
cancer. She had experience with the cancer deaths of
several family members, including her husband whom I
also managed. When I saw her to give her the news and
to explain the next steps in investigation and treatment,
she said “you know, I think I will just go home, enjoy a
few glasses of wine, walk my dog and do the best I can.”
I can’t argue with that and really admire her approach so
I’ve worked out a schedule to see her frequently and to
help her through her last days with as much dignity as
we can manage.
Q: What are the challenges of a rural practice?
A: You have to do everything. It really makes the practice interesting but it’s stressful as well. It’s impossible to
keep your skills like all those specialists and sometimes it’s
difficult to get patients out to the tertiary care centre in
Sudbury because the roads may not be drivable by land
ambulance or the helicopters won’t fly in. We don’t have
any specialists but a general surgeon comes in once a week.
Q: I understand you had a rough time back in
1999.
A: Yes. A doctor who’d been here for many years retired
and another doctor left the area. It was just down to two
of us for the whole year. It was a tough year. We would
be on call covering the emergency and hospital inpatients
every other day for 24 hours and then deal with our office patients on the day we weren’t on call. It was crazy. It
was hard to unwind and go to sleep because everything
was churning around in your mind. It was tough on
family too because I really wasn’t around much. It ended
when our third MD started in April, 2000.
Q: Who is in your family?
A: My wife Lois and I have been married for 35 years.
We have four children and two grandchildren. Jacob is
33 and a mechanical engineer in Maple. Leah is 32 and
a physiotherapist in Sudbury. Rachel is 29 and a veterinarian in Uxbridge. Vanessa, 27, is a financial planner
in Timmins.
As told to Communications Specialist, Prithi Yelaja. This interview
has been condensed and edited.