COLUMN: Viewpoint – Make the sacrifice and get vaccinated

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/12/2021 (1255 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Recently my father Dr. Paul Peters received a Physician Emeritus award from the Southern Health region. He was honored for his contributions during his nearly forty-year career as a doctor. Dad was chief of staff at the Bethesda Hospital and a founding partner of the Steinbach Family Medical Centre. He represented Southern Health on the Manitoba Medical Association Board and mentored medical students for fifteen years. Dad delivered hundreds of babies, performed thousands of surgeries and I can’t begin to count how many times I heard him get up during the night to make house calls. He often spent our family supper hour on the phone with his patients.

Once Dad retired, he volunteered as a health advisor on the Steinbach settlement committee for new immigrants and chaired the Eden East committee during the construction of Penfeld Court Housing in Steinbach. Dad was a Hanover School Division trustee for eight years and a board member of Steinbach Seniors Housing Incorporated for a decade. He was on the executive of the Steinbach Garden Club, volunteered at the Steinbach Heritage Village Museum and served Steinbach’s Grace Mennonite Church in dozens of different capacities.

We took the award Dad received from the Southern Health region and gave it to him in his nursing home. I think he knew it was something special but didn’t really understand what the award was all about because the pandemic has caused my dad to spiral into dementia. We have had to move him several times in the last eighteen months to find a suitable placement that can accommodate his needs.

Since Dad has been in care there have been periods when we couldn’t see him at all due to pandemic restrictions, and now it has been almost a year since he has seen anyone in his family without a mask and a plastic shield hiding our faces. We can only take dad out of his care home for medical appointments. Dad sometimes looks at me in my mask and shield and asks when people will be themselves again, or when he can visit the village where he grew up. He looks at photos of the two great grandchildren he has never met and asks why he can’t hold them. It breaks my heart.

I know that if everyone in Manitoba was vaccinated, they would eventually be able to ease the strict regulations which keep Dad a kind of prisoner in his nursing home. But of course, some people are refusing to be vaccinated and in a cruel kind of irony many of those people reside in Southern Health. Some of the very people my father dedicated his entire career to serving so they could have better, healthier lives are now refusing to have a vaccination which might allow dad to have a better life.

Dad’s community in the Southern Health region has honored him in many ways. In 2004 the Steinbach Chamber of Commerce gave him their Community Service Award and in 2007 Mayor Chris Goertzen nominated Dad for a Premier’s Volunteer Service Award. And as I noted he was recently named Physician Emeritus for the Southern Health region.

All these awards are very kind and as his family we are certainly appreciative of the way the community has recognized our father’s contributions. But we would ask that if you really want to honour our dad and do something that would make whatever is left of his life just a little more positive and meaningful, that you get vaccinated. Dad made so many sacrifices to serve the people of Southern Health. Could you get a vaccination for him?