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CASUAL COUNTRY: A women's doctor

'It's been a great privilege and I have been well supported by physicians and nurse practitioners,' said Dr. Skye Raffard.

While it has been a year since she closed her practice, Williams Lake obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Skye Raffard has not fully retired.

The fall of 2024, she is teaching a course for the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine in Kelowna.

She has created a series of eight lectures, ideally for third year students.

After taking a sip of some black-currant infused sparkling water, made from currants in her expansive garden, Skye said third-year students are still impressionable but about to spin out into the world with all their factual knowledge.

With a course title of How to be a Good Doctor, some of her lectures will be: Let’s practice listening, How the good doctor gives bad news and Physician heal thyself.

Skye’s journey to become a doctor is worth a course of its own.

Growing up in Victoria, where her parents moved to after the Second World War, she was the oldest of three children.

Her two siblings were younger than her by five and six years so she was like an only child at the beginning.

While her father had been in the army, he did not like to talk about it.

“He put it in the past and didn’t join the legion or anything,” she recalled.

As the only child in the home for those early years, she enjoyed her parents’ friends and the many gatherings they participated in.

“They would be playing cards, laughing and making music. My father played the violin, accordion and piano. My grandmother had played the harp, my aunt played the guitar and one of my uncles - my dad was one of 10 - played the fiddle.”

Once a month her dad and his siblings would get together in Victoria and make music.

“It was wonderful,” she said. Chuckling, she added, “I’m not talented. “

At the age of 17, she left home and soon afterwards married young.

“In the early 1970s people didn’t go out in groups, which is a much healthier way for young people to be socializing,” she said. “We dated and I got married because I didn’t have any negative things to say about him. I was too young - though you could not have told me that.”

Three years after marrying she and her husband parted ways and have remained good friends.

They’d grown up together, parallel, but not intertwined, she explained.

“I never had the deep love for him that I have for my husband Peter [Opie],” she said, adding they met when she was 21 on Vancouver Island at a mutual friend’s house.

Career decisions

A year into a two-year registered nursing program, she decided it was not the career for her.

“Very kindly, my advisor at the time told me I wasn’t cut out for nursing. Yet, I highly respect nursing. They don’t have a job without us and we don’t have a job without them, but the role is different.”

Her one-year of nursing gave her six months of credit toward a midwifery program, which she took and completed in El Paso, Texas.

It was 1974 and midwives were licensed in the U.S., but not in Canada.

When she returned to Canada, she followed in her paternal grandmother’s footsteps and became a nurse midwife.

“I attended home births, there was a big movement of them in the 1970s, and I had an Australian family physician who was very supportive, and two other midwives.”

Determined, she and the other two midwives co-authored the legislation for midwifery in Canada. For their research they read the legislation from all 22 U.S. states where it was legal.

“In B.C. it was against medical support. It contravened the College of Physicians and Surgeons policies and regulations, but it wasn’t illegal it just wasn’t legal.”

Undaunted, she became a doula and taught prenatal classes in Victoria, and briefly in Nelson.

The 1970s, she recalled, were a time when women were wanting to regain control of their bodies.

Skye said she was a founding member of the Women’s Health Collective in Vancouver.

Eventually Ontario started legislative efforts and midwifery became licensed and with a ‘domino-effect’ it moved across the country.

By this time Skye had had four children in seven years and was a stay-at-home mom.

“I had been quietly practicing midwifery in Victoria, well-known to the hospital. I couldn’t deliver a baby in the hospital, but I had provided prenatal and then postnatal care, which is a hallmark of midwifery.”

Medical school

When she was 32, she thought back to a conversation she had with a close friend when they were just five.

Skye had asked Ginny what she wanted to be when she grew up and she’d answered, “an opera singer.”

“I said, I wanted to be the kind of doctor that cuts people open and fixes them.”

Ginny became an opera singer and has a beautiful voice, she confirmed.

“I realized if I wanted to become a doctor I better go to school now.”

Their youngest child was in Grade 1 and the oldest was in Grade 7.

Skye started taking courses to complete a Bachelor of Science, in microbiology and neuroscience, at the University of Victoria.

She graduated in 1985 after four years while working part-time, with their children - Christopher, Clayton, Tlell and Zoe - in tow and her forester husband Peter working away 10 days at a time and home for four.

“I cannot imagine how I did that,” she remarked. “I did get up at 4:30 in the morning — I’ve always been able to do that —and could study before the kids woke up. I think that was the reason for my success."

Having her parents in Victoria helped, she added.

Obtaining a catalogue from the University of British Columbia, she noticed a sentence warning if you were older than 27, it was best to go talk to the Dean.

“I made an appointment with Dr. Carter. He was a very nice man and he said ‘you’ve been practicing midwifery, why?’”

Skye told him about her grandmother and said she’d delivered her own babies at home.

Carter told her she was outside of the usual age of entrance and asked if she was thinking or pursuing litigation for discrimination because of her age if she did not get accepted.

She replied ‘not at this time’, but in her own mind thought, ‘that’s a gift.’

In the end, she did not need to appeal anything because she was admitted and entered medical school in 1986.

“I was lucky to get in because they took a chance on me. They did have quite a few older students that year.”

By then only two children were still at home, Peter decided to return to university and they lived in family housing at UBC.

The night before her pediatrics’ final exam she actually delivered the baby of a pediatrician and his wife at their house on campus.

“The baby was born at 4 a.m., was their fourth child, and I stayed for two more hours to care for her and then wrote my final exam.”

When the professor was handing back the exams, he left her to the end and she saw her mark was 105 per cent.

She told him he must have been a mistake, but he said she seemed to know her stuff.

One of the questions on the exam was about a slide showing the bare legs of a child with two red marks on the back of the legs. It asked if social services should be called to report child abuse.

“I wrote ‘no,’ and the reason why was the socks fell down and gumboots marked their bare legs. My kids had measles, and chicken pox and all that. Pediatrics was easy because it was basic and general knowledge of nature.”

UBC provide her with a solid foundation and a fabulous education, she recalled.
“It was easier to be an older student I think. One time my daughter came home and said 'people keep asking me what it’s like to have a mother who is a medical student. I don’t know I never had a mother who wasn’t a medical student.'”

Becoming a professional 

During a one-year internship at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster she met Dr. Dan Brosseuk, a former long-time surgeon at Cariboo Memorial Hospital.

“I had applied to become a specialist,” she said. “Dan was the first resident Royal Columbian had ever had and he was a general surgical resident.”

Brosseuk had ‘astounding’ laparoscopic surgical skills, she said.

“He has the best hands of any general surgeon I’ve ever worked with. When we’d finished our shifts and exhausted, we'd go in and watch him operate. He was teaching the surgeons there how to do laparoscopic surgery. He was just a natural.”

When Dr. Jim Grace invited Skye to check out Cariboo Memorial Hospital, while she was being led through the hospital and being introduced to everyone, she saw Dr. Brosseuk was on staff.

She’d had a job lined up in Vernon, but one of the OBGYNs at the Vernon Hospital had climbed a ladder, fell and broke his heel and had to retire.

A surgeon in Williams Lake moved to take the position so Raffard inquired about his job in Williams Lake.

“We flew up and thought it would be great. Peter could do forestry and I could do medical.”

Part of the Williams Lake health care community

It was 1998 when she joined CMH.

She recalled the medical collegiality as “wonderful” and the community as very welcoming.

She credited Dr. Noel Donnelly for teaching her a lot about how to be a doctor.

“He will be 91 in December,” she said. “He’s a wonderful man and a great story teller. I would assist him when he was operating and he would assist me when I was operating.”

When surgeons train, she explained, they are doing operations under a supervising doctor, but when there are complications and call backs in the middle of the night, the trainees are not part of that.

“You don’t see those things. Also, the stuff that comes walking into Williams Lake you wouldn’t see in a big city. The advanced stage of illness sometimes that people are walking into the hospital with.”

CMH was a remarkable place to work, she said, adding when she retired she had been operating eight days a month which is the highest number of operating days of any OBGYN in B.C.

In Williams Lake, the OBGYNs did not have competition. There was no neurosurgery or orthopedic surgery at the time.

“I got to have as much OR time as I could use.”

Until more recently, an OBGYN’s practice in Williams Lake involved two- thirds gynecology and one-third obstetrics and only high risk obstetrics. Family doctors delivered babies competently with the support of the OBGYNs when needed.

“It’s a surgical specialty as you spend four years learning how to do surgery. But you cannot forget that these are people. It’s not just a uterus in bed four, it’s a woman who had had a problem of some sort that is looking for a solution, often a surgical solution - cancers or whatever.”

She always enjoyed the combination of internal medicine, surgery and humanness of it all.

Next chapter 

Skye and Peter love to travel so the opportunity for Skye to teach family doctors on a cruise ship for 15 years provided them a means to see many other parts of the world.

“I’m one of several different faculty and usually there are two of us teaching medical doctors who are on vacation with their spouses,” she said.

In August 2023 she closed her office, continued to do on-call and emergency surgeries in September, then spent another few months doing all the paper work to wrap up 25 years of practice.

“I have seen over 25,000 women in 25 years,” she said.

She made her last call to a patient on Dec. 23, 2023, sharing some final results. “It has been a very rewarding. I have loved my job. It’s more than just a job.” Retiring from the hospital has been “bittersweet” because she did not feel finished, she said.

Getting up in the middle of the night to go and operate on someone in an urgent situation and then trying to go home and get a bit of sleep before working all day is for younger people, she admitted.

“I could still do it, but, at 71? Maybe not.”

As she sits back and reflects on her career she does miss operating and helping women have better lives.

“It’s been a great privilege and I have been very well supported by the physicians and nurse practitioners in this community and the midwives and all the hospital staff.”

Aside from the teaching gig at UBC Okanagan, Skye hopes to complete a degree in organic chemistry she is halfway through and become a master gardener.

She and Peter have eight grandchildren who they love spending time with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Monica Lamb-Yorski

About the Author: Monica Lamb-Yorski

A B.C. gal, I was born in Alert Bay, raised in Nelson, graduated from the University of Winnipeg, and wrote my first-ever article for the Prince Rupert Daily News.
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