MEMBERS
DR. Who
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT NICOLAS AJKAY, MD
Aaron Burch
In 1982, a young boy and his brother are riding bicycles along dirt roads in the Andes Mountains surrounding Bogota, Colombia. In 1993, the boy becomes a young doctor delivering babies on the floor of a crowded hospital. 1996, he stares out of a hospital window as helicopters full of injured soldiers arrive to be treated in the dead of night. In 2000, in a living room in Virginia, he dances the salsa with a woman who’ d soon be his wife. In 2008, the couple becomes a family as their son is born in Pikeville, Kentucky. A daughter would follow close behind. In 2014, the doctor walks into his new office at the University of Louisville, having achieved the goals that he had set himself for decades.
Dr. Nicolas Ajkay( pronounced EYE-Kai) was born in Lima, Peru, the oldest son of a Hungarian father and a Colombian mother. His father had immigrated from Hungary in 1956 with Dr. Ajkay’ s uncle and grandmother, as Russians invaded the country. Soon after his birth, Dr. Ajkay’ s family relocated to Bogota.
The beautiful city, which sits 8,600 feet above sea level, has no seasons other than rainy and dry. With a temperature that sits between 40 and 70 degrees all year long, it is the perfect atmosphere for riding bicycles no matter the month.“ I remember my dad complaining about the government or roads or whatever it is people complain about. But then he’ d say,‘ But the weather is great.’ What is he talking about? It took me coming to the Northern Hemisphere to understand,” Dr. Ajkay said knowingly.
Colombian medical school is structured far differently than here in the United States. There, undergraduate and pre-medical courses are combined with medical school into a 5-year program followed by a year of transitional internship and a year of social service. So, before his 18 th birthday, Dr. Ajkay was accepted to medical school at the historic Rosario University.
Inspired by a plastic surgery resident who tutored him and his fellow classmates in anatomy, Dr. Ajkay discovered his passion for the specialty.“ When I did my surgery rotations during fourth year, I already knew that was what I wanted. The rotation just cemented my desire to be a surgeon.” Due to the pyramidal structure
of medical school at the time, of 80 medical students who entered the program with Dr. Ajkay, just 11 would graduate five years later.
The next step was an internship year within three different hospitals in Bogota covering internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and anesthesia.“ You had to be prepared for anything that might arise during your social service year, because you may be THE only physician of a small rural community. So, the year of rotations touched on everything from prescribing anti-hypertensive medication to delivering babies,” he said.
At the Kennedy Hospital, a trauma and charity hospital, there( continued on page 30)
Editor’ s Note: Welcome to Louisville Medicine’ s member spotlight section, Dr. Who? In the interest of simply getting to know each other as a society of colleagues, we’ ll be highlighting random GLMS physicians on a regular basis. If you would like to recommend any GLMS physician member to the Editorial Board for this section, please e-mail aaron. burch @ glms. org or call him at 736-6338.
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