Four medical students who graduated high school in Quesnel are now celebrating graduating from UNBC's Northern Medical Program and are heading out into the world of medicine. This is the first of a two-part Hometown Hero highlighting two of the recent graduates.
Jordyn Henderson, Arlo Johnson, Carmen Huang and Cynthia Van Dykhuizen are the now graduates of the program. Henderson graduated from Correlieu in 2017, Huang in 2016, Van Dykhuizen in 2015 and Johnson graduated from Quesnel Secondary School in 2008.
Johnson had a full career before entering medical school, he worked in engineering across B.C. for around a decade. He thought about going down a different path before COVID and once the pandemic hit, he applied and is one of 40 students in this year's class.
Van Dykhuizen did her undergrad in molecular biology and biochemistry and spent time working with adults who have disabilities in Prince George before getting into medical school.
"My sister has some pretty complex neurological needs and so that was kind of always the goal, I was going to do neurology and then got in and realized that was probably not for me," she said.
None of them are able to do the next phase of their medical training in Quesnel due to the CaRMS process (Canadian medical residency matching system) which places medical school grads in different areas across Canada.
Johnson is going the furthest from B.C., to take a specialized emergency medicine program in Regina, Saskatchewan. That program will last five years and begin this summer. Because it is a very competitive program, Johnson had no interview offers in B.C. but is excited to be able to do the program.
"Specialty emerge training is generally reserved for people who want to serve big trauma centres and stuff like that," Johnson said. "My primary interest would be providing emergency care to centres that have access to trauma and access to pediatric emergency medicine as well."
The program will equip Johnson to be able to work in the biggest and busiest hospitals in North America and beyond. Despite that being his primary interest, Johnson doesn't feel a major centre will ever be his long-term home.
He said emergency departments in the north are well-served in most communities, but the interior struggles with staffing and sees ER closures often. That's a problem he hopes he can help solve.
"I have a passion for teaching and I love administration and leadership and that kind of thing and I'm hoping that someday I have the ability to think on a more systems level of how we can address those types of challenges for the communities I grew up in," he said. "I don't have any interest in leaving the small communities behind, I just think maybe I'll be able to serve them in a bit of a different way than these guys might be able to," he added, gesturing to the three other grads.
Van Dykhuizen, Henderson and Huang are all going into family medicine. They're excited for the chance to do a wide variety of care and connect with the communities they're going to.
A highlight for Van Dykhuizen throughout medical school was a rural family elective in Kitimat, there she was taught by a doctor who she said did everything. He would preform C-sections, assist with surgeries, work in the emergency department and a wide variety of other things both in the hospital and at a clinic.
"I would go spend mornings watching the anesthesiologists do their thing and then spend the afternoon helping him deliver babies and then go to emerge," she said. "It was the first time I really saw exactly how much variety family medicine can be."
During medical school, she also did rotations with long-term care and she is very passionate about helping with long-term and palliative care. In family medicine, she will see a wide variety of cases and that's something she's excited about.
"You can kind of run the gamut of medicine, you can literally dip your toes into almost every field," she said. She will be going to Nanaimo, which she said she is very excited about. "I'm still not 100 per cent sure exactly where I want to be so the nice thing about family is you can still decide, we still have time to figure that out."
She said she has a lot of connections to the north with much of her family living in Quesnel and she's very much open to coming back to the north after completing the rest of her training in Nanaimo.
One of the things she was told throughout medical school is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. She explained how vast medical training is with geriatrics, plastic surgery and neonatal care all being very diverse and come with unique challenges. In medical school, students bounce around between those different areas every few weeks.
"You become really flexible and you get really good at kind of adapting to your circumstances," she said. "I think you just grow as a person as a result."
Both Van Dykhuizen and Henderson toured several communities throughout the north with a group of students and medical professionals to help engage youth and get them interested in pursuing medicine.
The graduates offered a piece of advice for anyone who is considering medical school.
Johnson said he wants people to know it is okay if it takes a long time to get to where people want to be.
"There's a lot of pressure, I think, especially on undergraduates. You're like 17, 18, 19 starting university and your parents want you to be a doctor, everybody thinks you're going to be a doctor, I think just lean away from that. Just take your time," he said. "I feel pretty confident in saying if it's meant for you, you'll find a way to do it."
He said people can start medical school as soon as they finish their undergrad, or they can wait a decade. They can have a full career in an unrelated field and still be successful.
Van Dykhuizen said while many people think medical students need to have a strong science background that isn't necessarily the case and and people can come from a wide variety of undergrad backgrounds to enter medical school.
"It's a wide variety of people from a really diverse set of backgrounds so you don't need to think you can make it because you didn't do a stereotypical, what you would think a med background would be."
The second part of the series featuring Huang and Henderson will be published for the next Hometown Hero feature.
