Physician of the Year aims to inspire others
The Physician of the Year award for the Edmonton area this year belongs to Dr. Melanie Currie of Spruce Grove, who can tell you a great deal about life, death and making a career as a family doctor.
Currie has practised medicine for 20 years. She likes how varied her work is, a mix of family health, obstetrics, acute-care hospital work and palliative care.
“It’s from womb to tomb, from conception to cremation,” Currie, 47, says. “In family practice, you get to know your patients well and you get relationships with them. I have kids that I’ve been looking after since they were little babies and I’m delivering their babies now.”
Why become a doctor?
“I think I always knew I kind of liked telling people what to do ... If you’re happy enough taking the lead or taking charge, it’s a good job.”
Anything else?
“You really want to be an advocate and help. As lame as it sounds, that’s honestly why you think you want to do it ... It’s a calling to make people’s lives better.”
She trained at the University of Alberta, then practised in Lac La Biche for three years before moving to Spruce Grove, where she’s been an owner-operator of the Westgrove Clinic, which has 14 doctors.
In Spruce Grove, she and her husband, Hiroki Currie, a forestry biologist, decided he would work at home as a mechanic and woodworker and be the primary stay-at-home parent for their two children, which freed her up to work.
“I always felt I could do it because Hiroki was there,” she says.
From 2005-11, Currie was lead physician for the Westview Hospital’s maternity program, where she worked closely with midwives. Midwives had a bad name with many doctors, mainly because doctors were only called in when things went wrong with a midwife delivery. But doctors came to learn from the midwives, she says.
“For delivering babies, we always used to deliver baby, clamp and cut cord, take baby away, put it on the warmer, weigh it, all these things,” Currie says. “The midwives do it a little different: put the baby on mom, leave it alone, cut the cord at their leisure, and never even worry about weighing the baby. Guess what we (physicians) all do now? Exactly what the midwives did. Because the evidence shows it’s better, that is actually transitions the baby to life better, less respiratory troubles, less all sorts of troubles.”
In 2014, Currie helped establish the Westview Hospice in Stony Plain. Her rule is to keep her dying patients comfortable.
“They should not have pain. They shouldn’t have nausea. They’re going to have confusion, but I should try to make it better if I can. And I try to be a support for the families, as well. Sometimes, the patient is totally ready and the family is not. I standardly tell everybody, ‘We all die. We can’t get out of it.’ It’s just you want to make it as good of a process as you can.”
As for the award, handed out by the Edmonton Zone Medical Staff Association, Currie felt a bit embarrassed to win, she says, because she knows the region is full of amazing doctors.
“I got it because I’m a girl,” she jokes.
In medicine currently, she finds female physicians are the hardest workers. She says she’s never felt discriminated against because of her sex: “I never felt being a woman made it harder. I never came across that, or didn’t recognize it.”
The award was special in one important way — the reaction of her 20-year-old daughter, Julia, a business student at the University of Alberta.
“The coolest part about it — you’re going to laugh — is that my daughter said to me that I inspired her. And I had never heard that from her, ever.
“I never get the impression that (my children) like my life. ‘Cause I’m gone a lot. I always remember when I was doing deliveries in Stony (Plain), because it was just me doing them, and I was taking my daughter and her friend to some 4-H thing, and I had a lady suddenly show up in labour. I had to call my husband to meet me on the highway and transfer the kids so I can go and catch a baby.”
Currie was hesitant to give this interview, but her daughter persuaded her.
“She said she felt I needed to because women needed to know they can have kids and be a doctor, be a leader, be all these things, that you could really do it all.”