ARMCHAIR ARCHIVES – Losing one of our community’s very best doctors
Editor’s note: Almost 10 years ago, family physician Paul Yanko announced he was closing his practice due to a personal medical situation. Paul was a brilliant, much-respected doctor who cared deeply for the welfare of his patients. For well over two dozen years, he was my family’s GP, and the end of his practice was a major loss for us as well as for his many other patients. That loss has deepened with the announcement that Paul passed away very recently — having struggled with a brain tumour all these years, he chose MAID to end his life. His passing reminded me of an editorial I wrote shortly after he closed his medical practice in April 2015. It tries to explain why Paul Yanko was so important to so many:
LET ME TELL YOU 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 is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Webster Foundation Commentator of the Year finalist. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
I found out that my family doctor is also retiring. I booked a final appointment to make sure all my meds were updated and refilled plus my family doctor has become a friend and I wanted to make sure they knew how much they had meant to me. They got me through some really tough times. I know my doc was really trying hard to find new GP’s to take over the practice.
I was stunned to hear what had been happening. The practice came , free of charge, with 4 exam rooms, all the equipment as well as a plethora of patients and an ideal location. Several new MD’s applied and here are some of their responses. Once they looked over the site they were interviewed by my doctor. One asked how many “old patients” were in the patient roster. Old meant over 60. Far too many for this young fella. He only wanted younger healthier patients. Applicant number 2 asked about hrs. the clinic was open during the week, as they only wanted to work 2 days a week. They loved the outdoor life style so needed time to chillax, after all, 2 full days of work in a week would be exhausting. Applicant number 3 wondered who ran the office. Along with one front end staff, my doctor ran the clinic. Apparently they didn’t want to do that. My doc suggested to all of them, that maybe they could work with several other doctors so that they could work only 2 days a week on rotation, somebody can deal with the old folks and they could hire somebody to “run” the office. OMG, not only do they have unrealistic demands, they insist on interviewing the patients and they decide on the basis of age, health and how much time a patient will need per appointment ,whether they will take them or not.
It was suggested that there would be no GP’s in 5 years, instead we would be seeing an online doc and then shuffled off to a specialist and then 5 yrs. after that it would go to just folks diagnosing them selves and making appointments with whomever they felt they needed to see. What a fiasco.
I was lucky to have a doctor who actually went into medicine because they wanted to help and who is sad and feeling guilty because they are leaving their patients in a lurch. It seems that some of the new doctors are only practicing medicine to finance their lifestyle not to help others. Doctors from out of the country come in, work their allotted time under a licensed practitioner and then some leave to go back east where they are paid more.
Possibly the answer is fully staffed and equipped offices that new graduates could step right into. There are several examples of this in many countries. They would only see patients and somebody else would do the footwork of billing, taking messages, stocking supplies and sending reports. I totally agree that the doctors are responsible for way to much paper work and are burning out because of all the extra time they are spending doing non medical work. I thought our gov’t was looking into this but have not heard anything else.
So now I call 811 and hope, before I die, I get a GP. With my luck my cell will ring during my service saying I have an interview with a GP.
LikeLike
Truly sad to read such a fine physician died and died in such agonizing circumstances. Medicare has sure changed over the years and not for the better despite all the technological advancements.
LikeLike