Bill Roberts photo
Dr. Arnold Newton sits on a patient’s motorcycle while on the porch of his Davis Drive office last week. The baby doctor is leaving Southlake Health Care Centre for Ottawa.
Newmarket
July 01, 2008 12:08 AM
Doctor departs Newmarket happy
By: Patrick Mangion, Staff Writer
Dr. Arnold Newton figured surgeons could have all the glory.
He preferred a successful career in obstetrics, with the promise of a better lifestyle for his young wife, Marie, and their four children.
But those plans were laid to waste when his phone rang at 2 a.m. in the middle of a snow storm.
It was former Newmarket family doctor Peter Hanson, who quickly rambled through his vital signs to a half-conscious Dr. Newton, explaining he was too sick to drive from Toronto to deliver a baby at the Newmarket hospital.
As Dr. Newton was making his way to the hospital, he reflected on Dr. Hanson’s message and realized something was amiss.
“As I thought about it, I realized his vital signs were normal. He wasn’t sick at all,” Dr. Newton recalled with a laugh.
He was the victim of some rookie hazing on what turned out to be his first delivery.
More than 30 years and 14,000 babies later, he has mixed emotions as he prepares to leave the community that embraced him from the moment he arrived.
He’s moving to Ottawa next month, where he will enjoy a scaled-back workload as an obstetrician-gynecologist and spend more time with his children and grandchildren, who settled in our capital.
At the end of one of his final 24-hour shifts at Southlake Regional Health Centre, his eyes bloodshot, coffee in hand and his white medical coat draped over his broad shoulders, Dr. Newton hasn’t had the luxury of thinking much about the road not taken.
“I have absolutely no regrets. I’ve enjoyed every minute here and I’ll hugely miss my patients and my colleagues,” he said.
A series of serendipitous events led him from his Toronto home to the University of Western Ontario medical school, then Southlake Regional Health Centre and, now, Ottawa.
As a shaggy-haired graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s medical school, Dr. Newton faced an uncertain future.
With mounting debt and his wife pregnant with their first child, he considered a fellowship offered by Harvard University in Boston.
“I couldn’t do that to my family. I thought, ‘Is there another option?’.”
A short time later, Dr. Newton’s brother was skiing in Collingwood when he bumped into Dr. Larry Barcza, Dr. Newton’s friend from medical school.
He mentioned how a small hospital in Newmarket needed an obstetrician. He suggested Dr. Newton apply and passed the message on to his brother.
“I could work in a community or become an academic,” Dr. Newton said.
Following his second year of medical school, he spent the summer in the obstetrics department at London’s Victoria Hospital.
“It was a great group. Here I was, a kid with no money and they treated me to golf and dinners. They were very good to me and I liked the lifestyle,” Dr. Newton said.
By the time he graduated high school and made his final sale at his part-time job in the furniture department at The Bay, he was intent on becoming a surgeon.
“You just fall into things sometimes,” he shrugged in the Southlake birthing unit in which he has been a fixture since 1977.
He delivered four babies during last Tuesday’s shift; 11 the previous shift.
It is a beehive of activity where nurses, doctors and anxious expectant mothers ensure there’s never a dull moment.
On this day, a young mother and her husband frantically search her purse for a health card as nurses work to admit the soon-to-be mother.
Today, there are nine obstetricians at Southlake, formerly named York County Hospital. But when he started, he was one of just three.
It made for some extraordinarily long shifts.
Whenever he worked two or three-day shifts, his wife would drop off clean socks and underwear in a brown paper bag.
On several occasions, his unmentionables were mistaken for someone’s lunch and placed in the fridge.
“I can’t tell you how many times I had to wear cold underwear during a shift,” he said, breaking out in laughter.
The gregarious physician has a hearty laugh you don’t come to expect from a doctor.
It may have been Dr. Newton’s infectious sense of humour that finally broke Marie, after she had spurned his first three dating requests.
She was a nursing student when they met in a psychiatry course.
Her reluctance stemmed from a recent long-term relationship that soured.
When she finally agreed, there was one important condition; his handle-bar moustache had to go.
Her father, a conservative businessman, wouldn’t approve, she warned.
“It was the ’60s, I had the pork chop sideburns, the handle-bar moustache. It took me a long time to cultivate it. It was a hard decision,” he said.
He had his brother drive from Toronto so he could borrow his powder blue convertible MG for the date.
That proved to be the least of his worries, however.
“I couldn’t find her house. She lived on Normandy. There was a Normandy Heights, Normandy Boulevard, Normandy Street,” he said.
When he finally arrived, an hour late, she and her father were chuckling on the front porch.
They could hear the British sports car buzzing aimlessly around their subdivision for an hour.
Now, the couple will begin a new chapter in Ottawa where he will continue the work he loves.
“This is one of the few happy medical fields. When you look into a mother or father’s eyes, it’s very exciting and you’re a part of it. You can’t beat it.”
Dr.
Arnold Newton finishes our sentences:
• My strongest characteristic is ... my sense of humour.
• Three things I’d take to a desert island are ... volleyball, volleyball net, water.
• If I wasn’t in my current position, I’d be ... a furniture salesman.
• My autobiography would be entitled ... He Enjoyed What He Did.
• My favourite film is ... Easy Rider.
• Few people know that I ... garden.
• I could stand to work on ... spending more time with my family.
• The thing I’d most like to do before the end of my days is ... travel more.