Bill Nelems's daughter Sarah was joking with him recently about planning his final exit on his 100th birthday, in another 22 years. They agreed that going out like Tolkien's hobbit Bilbo Baggins wouldn't be so bad: setting sail from Middle Earth toward whatever new adventure awaited.
Things didn't turn out that way. But by all accounts, Dr.
Nelems would have been content that his sudden death from cardiac failure on
March 31 took place in his family's beloved cabin at Coldstream, B.C., to which
he regularly cycled from his home in Kelowna, 80 kilometres away. A man of many
enthusiasms, he'd recently developed a passion for bird-watching, and loved the
wild and marshy property.
"The thing I loved about my dad was that he was always
reinventing himself," recalls Sarah Nelems, the oldest of Dr. Nelems's
four daughters. "He had so many interests, from his athletic endeavours to
his charity in Zambia to his five grandchildren, whom he was completely devoted
to. He was so much larger than life, but what made him real was the presence he
had in so many people's lives."
Dr. Nelems will be remembered by history as a renowned
thoracic surgeon who was part of the Toronto General Hospital transplant team
that performed the world's first successful lung transplant, in 1983. But that
accomplishment was just one on a very long list, say those who knew him.
Philanthropist, athlete, mentor and citizen of the world, Dr. Nelems was
happily preparing for a new career as an end-of-life counsellor when his own
life ended shortly before his 78th birthday. "The world feels a lot less
interesting without him in it," says his daughter.
Bill Nelems was born April 26, 1939, in Springs, South
Africa, the second-born child of British Columbia couple Harry and Dory Nelems.
Harry was a young mining engineer who had found work in Johannesburg at the
start of the Depression. He returned to the Fraser Valley in the mid-1930s,
just long enough to marry Dory and move her back to South Africa.
Dr. Nelems and his older sister, Beverley Barron, also a doctor,
spent much of their childhood in the care of nannies and travelling back and
forth to boarding school. Dr. Barron remembers the family's return to Canada in
1956 as one of the first times in her life that she and her brother had lived
under the same roof.
The family settled in Toronto. Bill, 17 years old at the
time, initially followed in his father's footsteps and studied at the
University of Toronto to be a mining engineer. That career choice didn't last
long, but did help pay his way through medical school after he had an epiphany
soon after graduating as an engineer in 1962 and realized he'd rather be a
doctor, Dr. Barron says. He finished his medical studies in 1966.
"Those first years in Toronto weren't that happy for
any of us," Dr. Barron recalls. "My father hated his new job. My
mother was very unhappy. I couldn't get into medical school because Canada
wouldn't accept my credentials from South Africa. Bill couldn't get into
university because they had an extra year of high school in Ontario, Grade 13.
When he was finally able to start at the University of Toronto, I think he
found his companionship among the ex-pats who played on the university's rugby
team."
And what a team it was. Team captain in 1960 and 1961, Dr.
Nelems saw two undefeated seasons during his five years with the team. When the
University of Toronto inducted the 1959-63 Men's Rugby Team into its Sports
Hall of Fame last year, Dr. Nelems and his former teammates regaled the
audience with a tune they once sang when headed for the pub after practice.
Dr. Nelems and his first wife, Wendy Nelems (née Brown),
moved west in the early 1980s, settling in Vancouver and later Kelowna with
their three school-age daughters, Sarah, Martha and Rebeccah. He was much in
demand for the next 30 years, during which time he worked at the University of
British Columbia's faculty of medicine, established a new cancer centre in
Kelowna and developed a tele-consultation program to improve access for
patients outside of the urban core. He and his first wife divorced in 1990 and
Dr. Nelems went on to marry Mary Ellen McNaughton; they had a daughter, Rachel.
He leaves his wife; four daughters; sister; Bev York, for
whom he was a guardian; grandchildren, Alexander, Kate, Lucy, Willem, Evy;
Bev's children, Amanda and Tess; and his ex-wife.
Dr. Nelems's curiosity and compassion led him into many side
projects. His sister recalls him helping a group of Sudbury miners get
compensation and surgery for lung cancers resulting from workplace exposure to
radiation. While at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, he led a project
involving 10,000 British Columbia miners that piloted the use of a blood test
to detect early changes related to lung cancer, the first mass screening of its
kind.
A trip to Zambia in 2006 took him back to Africa for the
first time in decades, and ignited a new passion. While there, he met up with
an old University of Toronto classmate, Chifumbe Chintu, who had become a
renowned pediatrician there. Dr. Chintu introduced him to the assistant dean at
the University of Zambia's Faculty of Medicine, who was deeply concerned at the
dismal medical outcomes in Zambia's impoverished Western Province. (In a twist
of fate, Dr. Chintu died not much more than a month after Dr. Nelems.)
That meeting got Dr. Nelems enthused with the idea of
bringing Canadian doctors and nurses to Africa to mentor and support their
Zambian peers. The Okanagan-Zambia Health Initiative (OkaZHI) was born in 2009,
and continues to bring medical professionals and nursing students into Zambia
to teach, mentor and learn.
"What was so great about Bill was that he not only
genuinely saw nurses as the equals of doctors, but he had that same approach in
his Zambia work," says Muriel Kranabetter, a former OkaZHI board chair and
a UBC nursing instructor who leads student groups to Zambia. "We were
never the Canadians who knew all, coming to Zambia to tell people what to do.
We were equals. That was the essential piece that made the initiative so
effective."
Dr. Nelems blogged about Africa being "in his
blood," and how he felt driven to help the continent of his birth.
"Simply stated, I have been blessed beyond reason by the education, the
good fortune and the career opportunities that I have enjoyed," he wrote
on the OkaZHI website.
"I have lived a charmed life. It is time for me to give
back a little of what was so abundantly gifted to me."
To raise funds and public awareness for the Zambia work, Dr.
Nelems joined the 2010 Tour d'Afrique annual cycling event for the final
4,500-kilometre leg from Lilongwe, Malawi, to Cape Town, South Africa. He
marked his 71st birthday that year by riding 204 kilometres in a single day.
His blog posts from that period are filled with enthusiastic
accounts of his daily adventures, like the time he cycled through a herd of
angry water buffalo blocking the road by drawing on remembered advice from back
in B.C. to "look big" if a grizzly bear attacks. Another day, he
performed impromptu plastic surgery on a fellow cyclist who sustained serious
facial injuries after colliding with another cyclist.
UBC nursing instructor Jessica Barker helped Dr. Nelems
launch his Zambian non-profit, and cycled with him on the Tour d'Afrique. She
was in Zambia with a group of student nurses when Dr. Nelems died, and said his
Zambian friends and co-workers were deeply saddened by the news. "I had
the pleasure of working with him as a surgeon, too. He was so good with his
patients," Ms. Barker recalls. "He pulled out stories from people,
and connected with them through those stories."
Dr. Nelems never lost the drive to tackle new challenges and
test his capabilities, notes his daughter Sarah. At the time of his death, he
was working at a pain management clinic in Kelowna, with plans to add another
medical specialty to his list of accomplishments and become the oldest Canadian
ever to write a Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada exam.
"There were a lot of milestones in Dad's life,"
Ms. Nelems says. "We hoped for many more, of course, but we are so
grateful for a life well lived."