A life dedicated to helping others
COURAGE TO COME BACK: Blindness, kidney disease doesn’t stop 73-year-old from making a difference
This is the first of six profiles on recipients of the 2016 Courage To Come Back Awards, presented by Coast Mental Health to six outstanding people who have overcome great obstacles, only to give back to their communities. Their inspiring comebacks will be celebrated at a gala dinner at the Vancouver Convention Centre West on May 5.
No one would blame Tom Mutsuo Teranishi if, at age 73 and with continuing lifelong medical issues, he decided to retire.
But the recipient of the 2016 Courage To Come Back Award in the medical category has no plans to stop helping others, as he did in his long and varied career as a social worker, despite the blindness and kidney disease he’s lived with all his life.
“Basically, my parents always taught us if you see someone in need somewhere, then you help them,” he said.
His parents’ magnanimity is remarkable in that Teranishi was born on Sept. 9, 1942, in a camp to where his parents and grandparents were taken from their Steveston home and interned only because they were Japanese Canadians, something he plays down.
“Let’s leave the past in the past,” he said. “It’s still an emotional issue. I don’t want to dwell on it. My parents would say, you’ve got to let it go, it happened. There are people who hold grudges, I don’t know why. It takes a lot of energy. Use that energy to do something creative.”
Teranishi has always had to use his energy to complete tasks that would take others a fraction of the time and effort because of his virtual lack of eyesight and his lifelong kidney disease, which as recently as 2015 had him undergoing a second kidney transplant, 31 years after the first.
“I’ve seen a lot of adversity,” he said, adding that to see “how hard people worked to overcome adversities” was his impetus to a career in social work, where he knew gaining trust was the first step in helping people.
“In the beginning, if you don’t develop a relationship, it doesn’t matter what you do.”
Teranishi, after earning his degree at UBC thanks to the kindness of friends who read texts to him, started his social worker career in 1968 at the old Shaughnessy Hospital, where he helped rehabilitate war veterans and federal employees and taught firstyear social work students — training that included trips to places such as the Downtown Eastside.
In the 1990s, he moved to Vancouver Hospital and continued to work in physical rehab and supervising students, until officially retiring in 2004.
His medical problems continued and worsened in the last few years, requiring hospitalization and a pacemaker, but that didn’t stop him from continuing his helping ways.
“Tom has been an inspiration to his clients as they deal with their own physical disabilities,” wrote Dr. Hugh Anton, a UBC professor in physical rehabilitation, who called him a friend to colleagues and a role model and teacher for younger professionals.
“Tom’s medical conditions would have humbled a lesser man.”
Beginning when he was a teenager, Teranishi has volunteered for groups that advocate for the disabled, seniors and immigrants, including the Metro Vancouver Cross Cultural Seniors Network, the Lions Society, the Canadian Disabled Individuals Society, the Vancouver Blind Curling Club, the Philippine Tsunami Fund and various senior lobby groups.
He continues to write a monthly newsletter to help seniors access resources because “if they don’t know where to go, they’re stuck.”
He said he’s always been motivated by helping others and is gratified and fulfilled by their success, recalling one quadriplegic patient in the spinal cord unit who happily reported to Teranishi that he finally had scratched his own nose.
“He said, ‘I think I’ll try my ears next.’ I’ll never forget that,” Teranishi said.
“At the end of the day, you’ve done something for others.”