By Brian Lee
So there it was.
There could never be a better moment to confirm the story. It was at the book launch for The Doc’s Side: Tales of a Sunshine Coast Doctor, Dr. Eric Paetkau’s stack of stories about his past 50 years practising medicine on the Sunshine Coast. Paetkau had just finished reliving some of the mishaps that occurred from mixing medicine with some of the personalities from the old Sunshine Coast.
I hadn’t yet read the book but sat waiting for one story in particular. It was a story told to me a long time ago and one that would have taken place before I was born. I listened as Paetkau recounted tales about the very early days of the St. Mary’s Hospital in Garden Bay.
Of logging camp accidents and of good times spent with fellow doctors. Of house calls and crazy people. But he didn’t tell this story.
Afterwards, he asked his appreciative audience of friends and former patients if they had questions for him. I felt like he was speaking directly to me — because I had a good one.
Someone once told me a yarn involving three well-known doctors: Dr. Paetkau, Dr. Walter Burtnick and Dr. Alan Swan. It sounded plausible enough, but I had suspicions that it might be too clever to be true.
The three worked at St. Mary’s Hospital in Garden Bay and were good friends. But they were also each other’s doctor and, as such, they would have to perform examinations on each other. My version of the story goes that Dr. Swan was to receive a prostate examination from Dr. Burtnick.
Burtnick had Swan bent over a table in an examination room, facing away from the door. Though they were trusted friends, one can assume both must have been experiencing a little discomfort.
But, it’s likely that Swan, lying prostrate with his pants at his ankles while considering the girth of the sasquatch-like Burtnick’s finger, had the most to be nervous about. As Dr. Burtnick was about to deliver his prostate exam, Dr. Paetkau quietly let himself in the room holding a shushing finger to his smiling lips.
Burtnick carried on without giving away a thing. With his right hand, he firmly grasped his patient’s right shoulder to steady him while he performed the exam with his left. While the patient was in mid-palpation, Paetkau moved in quietly and placed his left hand on Swan’s other shoulder.
One can’t know what went through the mind of the deeply religious Swan as he nervously did the math but I guess he might have been confused, to say the least. After all these years, I can’t even be sure the names in this story land in the correct order — maybe it was Paetkau on the table?But with Burtnick and Swan both now gone, only he remained to verify it’s accuracy.
So, given the opportunity, you’d have thought I’d jump on him like a trampoline in a kangaroo daycare. But I didn’t.
Maybe I feared offending his young grandchildren sitting in the front row of the audience. Or maybe it was for my own selfish pleasure — I just didn’t want to risk ruining a good story.