COMING FULL CIRCLE WITH SMA ROADMAP By Maria Ryhorski
Sitting down with Roadmap Program veteran Dr. Reid Sonntag, almost three years after first meeting him on the 2013 tour to Arcola and Carlyle, it’s not hard to reconcile the slightly more serious resident before me with the fun-loving, life-of-the party student who is affectionately remembered by SMA Roadmap staff for volunteering both arms for beginners IV-practise in Ilea-la-Crosse. I caught up with Reid, now almost a year into his family medicine residency in Swift Current. MR: So we’ve come full circle – two and a half years after the Roadmap Tour to Swift Current, here you are as a first-year resident. And I understand that you weren’t even initially interested in rural/regional practice – did your experience on the Roadmap Tours have any effect on this shift? RS: Yeah it did. I had this impression in medical school that being a family doctor meant that you went to the clinic at 9 o’clock on Monday, left at 5, did that every day, and became a referral machine. I think that when I came to Swift Current for the Roadmap Tour, it was the start of me realizing what family docs can actually do. I grew up in a rural community so you kind of have this picture of what a rural doc looks like – what they do – but it isn’t until you’re in the thick of things that you can really see that rural family doctors are true generalists. I think it’s amazing that here in Swift Current there are family doctors who work in the Emergency, who work in the clinic, who have inpatients, and work in obstetrics as well. To me, that is just the epitome of what it means to be a physician.
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SMA DIGEST | SPRING 2017