I, like most people live day to day, passing along a chain of petty and momentous events throughout the day but not out of the ordinary daily life experienced by the people around me. But through having had an unusual trajectory into life, parental and family background, childhood experience, quirky personality, and exposure to momentous events in society and personally as a physician, scientist, and notorious eccentric. Although I will tell of a number of extraordinary “once in a lifetime” experiences, my focus will be to keep to those that I believe have universal human meaning, perhaps even a life’s lesson. I will keep each installment to between 600-1000 words so they can be read in less than 3-4 minutes. Longer stories will be told in a linked series of parts, each of the same ‘bite size’ portions.
I will initially try to group the stories by themes and sub-themes, within the categories such as “personal history”, “scientific discovery”, “greatest medical cases ever” “life lessons learned”. But I suspect in the breadth of time the readers will see the stories all coalesce by time-line, by theme and story line, into a single life story.
I arrived in Canada with my parents as a 6 year old refugee in about 1955. We moved into my maternal uncle’s apartment above his grocery store at Dundas and Kensington Ave, just on the border of Kensington Market in downtown Toronto. I was enrolled in Grade 1 at Ryerson Public school on the corner of Dundas and Bathurst St. I am now 71 years old. I am married with 4 children and 8 grandchildren. Professionally I am a physician practicing at Toronto General Hospital. My research is done mostly at Toronto Western Hospital, across the street from Ryerson Public School.
A few blocks away, at Dundas St. and University Avenue, is a company of which I am one of the founders: Thornhill Medical Inc. It now employs about 30 people. We make unique life support systems used by militaries and disaster relief organizations to keep the wounded alive during transport to higher echelons of care; a portable form of anesthetic delivery suitable for the battle field that is more technically advanced than what is available in the civilian hospitals; an adjunct to MRI that enables a unique type of brain imaging I use in my neuroscience research—as do other researchers at about 37 other elite centers around the world.
For visitors to these pages, please be assured that these stories are all true in the sense that they happened the way I describe to the best of my memory. I will try to choose stories that are entertaining, amusing, amazing, and particularly, those that illustrate discovered truths and have taught me important life lessons.
In writing the blog I will include some pertinent family and personal history, but only those aspects that pertain to the narrative, the object lessons and how the science was discovered.
Still, I have in mind those in my family who perished and whose stories perished with them, but whose talent, mindset and personality traits certainly course through my veins; also my progeny and siblings, so they can bridge the silent gap of the continuum of their existence and at least have what is in these pages to pass on to their children.