COLUMN — Joining the ranks of patients without doctors sucks

COLUMN — Let me tell what it feels like to lose your family doctor.

It sucks. It feels like you’ve lost a good friend, a member of the family.

Paul Yanko has been my GP since he took over Lloyd Nixon’s practice in 1989. Paul announced this week he must close his practice effective May 8 for personal medical reasons. My family and I are sad he must do this because we know he loves being a family doctor.

And now, the search begins. The Division of Family Practice is taking names and numbers. They tell me we’ll get a form to fill out in about a month, then we wait to see if any new doctors come to town or any current ones get an opening in their patient load.

Joining the club of patients without doctors is not a happy prospect. As I wrote on Thursday about Paul’s announcement to his patients, there are, at the least, several thousand Kamloops residents without a family doctor. How long will it take to find a new one? Months at least, years more likely. In the meantime, there’s the prospect of joining the throngs at the walk-in clinics where you wait for hours and get six minutes of a white-coated stranger’s time.

When your body is young and all the parts tick along like a Swiss watch (or, if you prefer, an Apple Watch) you don’t care much about doctors. You don’t need them.

As you get older, you really appreciate them. You need a family doctor who knows about you, knows who you are and knows your history and all the things inside you that don’t work as well as they once did.

With a good family doctor, you don’t worry about getting sick. Without one, you wonder what you’ll do the next time you come down with something. There’s something very wrong with a system that accepts that kind of uncertainty as the norm.

Paul Yanko is a superb diagnostician. For years, I had a condition that was mis-diagnosed. Paul Yanko figured it out right away. I mean like right there in his office, in a few minutes.

On another occasion, a locum brushed off a mole that Paul took one look at and diagnosed as a carcinoma. A lab test proved him right.

I was taking a medication that wasn’t working the way I thought it should. He told me to try taking it at lunch time instead of first thing in the morning. The symptoms went away. He explained why.

It isn’t always quick and easy, but he’s always on the right track and narrows things down till he and you work out the answers together. He knows what he can fix and he knows when to send you to a specialist.

Along the way, he tells you how his day is going, and reassures you that yours will go fine. This is the kind of man you want on your side. I want a guy who’s fun to talk to and who I can trust to figure things out.

When I was about 12, I think it was, I started experiencing severe pain in my side. It wouldn’t go away. One night it was getting really hard to take. Worried, my mom called Dr. Stebnick. He drove to our house, checked me out and pronounced that they’d better get me to the hospital fast because my appendix was about to burst. He met us there and did the surgery himself that night.

I recall Paul Yanko saying a time or two that he liked to make house calls to older patients whenever he could — I know his huge patient load didn’t allow much of that, but that kind of family medicine is what he loves doing.

Nowadays, everybody wants to be a specialist in a big hospital — less hours, more money, fancy equipment.

Where will my family and I find another doctor like Paulo Yanko? We wish him the very best in dealing with whatever it is he’s dealing with now, and hope he gets the kind of care he’s been giving to others for so many years.

Mel Rothenburger can be contacted at armchairmayor@gmail.com. He tweets @MelRothenburger and is on Facebook/mrothenburger.7.