A LIFE WELL-PRACTICED

A Life Well-Practised

by Sandra Jones

IN A WORLD ILL-PREPARED FOR THE CRISIS AND CHAOS OF A PANDEMIC, THE GLOBAL RESUME OF DR. MICHAEL KENYON, CLINICAL LEAD PHYSICIAN AT NANAIMO HOSPITAL’S INTENSIVE CARE UNIT SEEMS SINGULARLY SUITED TO THIS UNPRECEDENTED TIME.

Growing up in South Africa as the great-grandson of a physician who qualified in the late 1800s at Edinburgh University alongside fellow student and future author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Kenyon knew from an early age that he wanted to be a doctor. “I graduated from high school two years early at age 16 and as a male in South Africa there were only two choices – go into the military or go to university. Being so young, I went right into university,” recalls Kenyon.

His youth presented some professional challenges in a country in which the age of majority was 21. “When I was a junior intern, another doctor would have to sign my scheduled prescriptions because I wasn’t an adult,” laughs Kenyon. He continued to forge ahead, working for over a decade at Baragwanath, the largest hospital in South Africa and third largest in the world, and fulfilling his mandatory South African military service.

“My entire training, outside of the military, was in Soweto, in the main black hospital in South Africa,” says Kenyon. “It was like being inside the civil war every day for 10 years.”

A longing for a more peaceful existence led Kenyon and his wife Karen to emigrate to Canada, landing in St. Anthony, Newfoundland in 1991. “I was the only Internist in the area which meant travelling to other communities,” says Kenyon. “When my clinics were in Labrador, I’d even commute by dog sled.”

After two years in Newfoundland, the couple moved to Saskatchewan, then Terrace, BC before moving to Fairwinds. Kenyon signed on at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital in 2001, where he established the ICU Specialist Group and introduced tertiary level services such as continuous renal replacement therapy.

The welcome sense of calm was short-lived. Kenyon served three tours with the Canadian military in Afghanistan at Kandahar Airfield as a civilian Intensivist. With sea containers as operating rooms, daily rocket attacks, and temperatures reaching +51 C, he was responsible for the ICU, providing resuscitation and life-support for critically-injured patients and training staff. He also lent his clinical expertise to the team to help plan for the expected arrival of the H1N1 influenza.

Whether overseas or here in BC, Kenyon’s love of teaching shines through. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Medicine, past Governor of the BC Chapter of the American College of Physicians, and designated Founder of the Specialty of General Internal Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians of Canada.

In addition to training fellows and residents at Nanaimo Hospital ICU, Kenyon works and teaches in Terrace for two out of every five weeks. He was instrumental in setting up the ICU/Internal Medicine Group in Terrace and ultimately trained the four internists who now work there with him.

“Part of our job in ICU is teaching the rest of the hospital how to deal with things like cardiac arrest. Internal medicine focuses on people who have a difficult diagnosis or a difficult treatment and I manage that part of it,” notes Kenyon.

However, his ability to diagnose wasn’t overly tested when, in the midst of a remote area of northern BC, Kenyon had a severe heart attack. “I was out fishing in the wilderness in a blizzard by myself when I hooked into a big steelhead for over 70 minutes before it dragged me down the canyon. I got an intense chest pain like I’d been stabbed. I crawled out and got to the car about a kilometre away. There was no cell service so I drove 20 minutes to the hospital and got my own treatment started. The ambulance took me to Prince Rupert during the blizzard before the air ambulance was able to fly me to Vancouver for an angioplasty.”

His recovery may be the only downtime this in-demand doctor has known in decades and it didn’t last long. “We knew COVID was coming in January 2020, which was well before people were getting very excited about it,” says Kenyon.

Again, his experience with both viruses and crises stood him in good stead. “We took the protocols from SARS and our experience from the H1N1 pandemic, which had a lot of similarities, and we started planning and training for the worst.” Although mid-Vancouver Island has had its share of COVID cases and deaths, it was nowhere near the worst-case scenario. “I’m pretty used to dealing with crisis situations and limited resources. It could have gone a lot worse. I think the public saved us more than we saved them in that it was their good behaviour in following health guidelines that allowed us to manage. If we had the kind of COVID cases they had in the U.S., we would have been overwhelmed.”

Now over a year into the pandemic, there are no ‘typical something that helps it’s days’. Long days are the norm starting at 8 am and winding down very gratifying. around 9 pm or sometimes into the next day. He continues to divide his time between the ICU and the COVID ICU in Nanaimo as well as in Terrace. “It’s a team effort that keeps the sickest of our patients alive and we have a skilled team.”

Kenyon’s career accomplishments are lengthy with colleagues joking that when they were creating the sign for his office door, there were too many letters after his name to fit on the sign. However, it’s the special combination of his expertise and passion that lead those around him to understand that being a doctor is not just what he does, but who he is.

In 2020, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of Excellence in Rural Medicine. “I was humbled by the award and I love working as a team with my nursing and support staff in the ICU and Internal Medicine. But it’s the patients who keep me going. I get to share their lives and their stories. It’s like working your way through a big mystery with them and when you find something that helps it’s very gratifying. Sometimes you can’t fix them but you can take the journey with them and help them with the narrative of their lives.

That’s a privilege.”