Glen Vienneau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 23/00) - One of Yellowknife's longest serving medical specialists has packed up his home and family and headed to southern Canada.

Sylvain Chouinard, a specialist in internal medicine who worked at Stanton Regional Hospital for the past 12 years, admits it wasn't an easy decision for him and his wife Anne Berube to make. Berube served as Yellowknife's first radiologist, and Yellowknife is the birth place of their three sons, aged six, eight, and nine.

"We came to visit in 1988, in the dead of winter in January and we just fell in love with the place," Chouinard said, adding, his family has made deep roots since then and experienced the Arctic lifestyle to the fullest, attracted to the day-long sunlight and travelling out in the land and to the communities.

Chouinard admits probably the best thing he gained from living here was his experience as an internist as working in the Northwest Territories has proven to be an ideal place to pick up skills you can't find in a large centre.

This may be why Chouinard had no trouble topping the list of candidates for the job he accepted at a Quebec City hospital.

"If you're a general specialty or family physician, I think that going into rural areas is the best thing you can do because it's the real world," reflects Chouinard.

While working as one of Yellowknife's two internists, his chief duties included dealing with areas including lung-related illnesses, heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes.

He also, out of necessity, picked up additional specialty skills in the area of gastronomy, biopsies and bone-marrow treatment.

"You do things that a general internist would not necessarily do. They can be done. There's some communities where it will be done, but not as a general rule," he said.

In addition, those duties were performed with limited resources and with little professional assistance from other physicians in the field.

But, it is an experience that he believes gave him qualifications the Quebec hospital was eager to have.

Professionally, he will be able to return to a familiar place where he trained as a doctor in his early career days.

In doing so, he will also be able to further his education, teach new physicians and take part in lectures and conferences.

Making a home

While Chouinard sold his home last June, he and his wife are refusing to give up their Tibbitt Lake cabin, which they co-own with friends.

"It wasn't money aspirations that kept us here for 12 years, it's really because we love the land and the community," he said Aug. 11, during his last day at the clinic.

"There's a lot of very interesting people up here. There's a blend of people from all over the place. You get to know the people in many communities and you get the feeling the place is really like a town, a community, the whole territory."

During the 12 years, he made friends in many of those communities, including Fort Simpson, Hay River, Iqaluit, Inuvik, Fort Smith, Kugluktuk, Cambridge Bay, Pelly Bay and Gjoa Heaven.

"The most we'll miss is the land, the people, the sun and the snow."