Dr Luk Chin was always going to be one – a doctor, that is.
The 80-year-old anaesthesiologist graduated from Otago University in 1966 and with no plans today to slow down, he attributes family heartache as the catalyst to a successful and long career.
Years were spent watching his sick mother sit in a bed with tubes in her chest.
“I was never asked to do medicine, but all my sisters and brothers, we all went into health-related professions, because we sat there looking at my mother in hospital.”
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Chin’s mother developed tuberculosis and spent much of his childhood on intravenous drugs and in a sanatorium. She was allowed to come home to the family for one afternoon a month.
Christel Yardley/Stuff
Dr Luk Chin’s second great love after medicine, is horses.
He and his siblings would visit her on the other days. Medicine for him, was a matter of the heart.
“Subconsciously it must have some impact on your mind.”
Chin was born in Dunedin. His father Bing and grandfather came from China to take part in the goldrush. His father returned home to marry his mother and they had his two older brothers there.
Bing returned to New Zealand to run a fruit shop in Dunedin, and Luk was born.
Luk Chin’s first post was Waikato Hospital, where he worked for two years before heading overseas.
He went via Australia to work at a country practice and meet wife Robin. From there he went to London to do his fellowship at the College of Surgeons.
Christel Yardley/Stuff
Luk Chin has been in medicine for 58 years, he hasn’t thought too much about retirement.
It was then on to Sweden to witness groundbreaking intensive care technology, and bring it home to New Zealand in 1974.
Chin started the country’s second intensive care unit at Waikato Hospital, alongside Dr Peter Rothwell.
“Basically when I come back to New Zealand, intensive care was only just beginning.”
After a short-term stay in Fiji, he decided anaesthesia was one to home in on as it was a developing technology. He has stuck with it ever since.
“Anaesthesia was very crude when I started out. We were the last ones to go through Otago Medical School where we had to use chlorophyll anaesthetic over cotton wool masks over the face.
“We used a gauze mask and this horrible fluid and all the patients were very sick and vomiting after it.”
Anaesthesia is now injected intravenously, but Chin says that even with nearly six decades’ experience he still feels the pressure, because there is an element of risk to every injection.
“There always is [pressure] … .of course it depends on the type of patient. The patient can have a lot of co-morbidity, they can have heart attacks and strokes and that adds to the risk.
“You have to be so careful and maintain them in a good situation, keep their blood pressure fine and watch how much blood they are losing during the procedure.”
In the mid-1980s he started a chronic pain service at the hospital and introduced spinal anaesthesia there. In 1991 the founder of Hamilton’s Anglesea Clinic, the late John Sullivan, brought together a group of medical professionals – Chin was one. He still works there.
Achievements are plenty, but he isn’t here to list them. Chin would, however, like to speak about New Zealand’s “broken” health system.
“We have underfunded our health system for years. We don’t train enough doctors and we don’t train enough nurses in New Zealand to cover our service.”
With 58 years in medicine he is well-placed to observe that problems are systemic and started decades ago.
He gives as reasons for the struggling health system the lack of medical schools to educate students, low pay for graduates and a competitive neighbour in Australia, which offers better services and pay for those in the medical profession.
“To be quite honest we are in a trigger situation. The health system is going to take years to build up, and basically we have to rely on importing our medical experts.”
An ageing population and modern medicine are also putting pressure on the health system.
At 80 Chin falls into this category. He’s had two hip replacements, a knee replacement, a spinal fusion and two dislocated shoulders.
But the self-confessed workaholic is still working fulltime, five days a week, and has the same passion for the job as he did in 1966.
“I love it and that’s why I keep working.”
Christel Yardley/Stuff
Luk Chin was awarded a lifetime legacy award at the New Zealand Rural Sports awards last month.
Fifteen years after qualifying for the pension, he hasn’t discussed retirement with Robin.
“As long as I am capable I will keep working. Obviously in medicine at my level your standards have got to be sharp, and you have to be confident and everything else.”
“There will come a time when I will have to give it up, I realise that. When that time comes, I will say ‘fine, I will give it up’, but while I can, I will continue to help.”
He hasn’t given up his other great love either, horses.
Christel Yardley/Stuff
Dr Luk Chin took up the trots to keep physically fit and have a hobbie outside of work.
Chin started dabbling in the trotters in the 1980s because he needed a hobby, but also be close to the phone, as he was on call at Waikato Hospital. There were no cellphones, so he needed to be within earshot of the family home.
“I just felt if I am going to be on call and can’t go anywhere I may as well potter around and do something, and so I decided to start training a horse or two because I was quite interested in it.
“Then I decided to drive and yes, it just kept growing from there.”
As it turns out, he’s good at that. Chin has trained more than 160 winners and driven over 130, almost all trotters.
He’s up every morning at 5am to train them before heading to work around 8am.
They live on a country block in Tamahere, where the couple raised four children.
The property is a cultural melting pot, he jokes. An Australian wife, his own Chinese ancestry, and he’s got into a trend of naming his horses after Russians. Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Kasyanov to name a few.
This sprang up randomly and weirdly. A headline came up on the news in 1986 ‘Chernobyl Disaster’ – and so started the Russian lineage.
Last month Chin was awarded a lifetime legacy award at the New Zealand Rural Sports awards in Palmerston North for services to the sport.
“It is good because it balances your life a bit, medicine can be quite stressful. Looking after sick patients is a very mental type of work, so you need the balance and some sort of physical activity.”
He’s had other interests, such as his 60 acres of olives with his son in the Hunua Ranges and part ownership in an eco-tourism and conservation property at Retaruke, in Whanganui National Park, with the aim of raising awareness of the endangered brown kiwi and blue duck.
Chin knows he isn’t really what you’d call a perfectly balanced individual, however.
The five-year-old boy who watched over his mother and that feeling that gave him still drives him to help others.
It is no surprise, he says, that his children have not chosen to pursue medicine having seen his life dedication.
“Unfortunately they looked at me and I put them off medicine … sometimes they wouldn’t see me for three days.”
The irony is not lost on him.
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