Prof John McCall sits in his office at Dunedin Hospital and
(centre) performs a live-donor liver transplant at the New
Zealand Liver Transplant Unit at Auckland Hospital. Photos
by Gregor Richardson and John McCall.
For more than a decade, Dunedin-trained surgeon John
McCall was one of this country's leading liver transplant
specialists. Now he has accepted a new role teaching surgery at
the Dunedin School of Medicine and performing surgery at
Dunedin Hospital. Allison Rudd reports.
John McCall has come a long way since he was a medical
student stitching his first wound.
On that occasion, he fainted and woke up on the floor of the
Wellington Hospital A and E department.
"It was the situation - having to put a needle through
someone's flesh," he said, laughing.
"It's an unusual thing to do. Obviously, you get desensitised
to it to some degree."
But Prof McCall says while there is an aspect of surgery
which is compelling, he never forgets he is "physically
performing an assault" on patients.
Brought up in various parts of Southland and Otago, the
closest John McCall got to the medical profession was his
mother's work as a nurse. His father was a farm manager,
stock agent and shopkeeper and John planned on being a
farmer.
Neither did he have much involvement with tertiary education;
his older brother was first in the family to attend
university.
Prof McCall entered the Dunedin School of Medicine in the
late 1970s and discovered his niche, although had no burning
desire to be a surgeon.
"You become exposed to different things and surgery was one
of the things that interested me. At first, the tussle was
between [specialising in] surgery, general practice or
internal medicine."
So why surgery?
He says he enjoys the technical and personal challenges and
the ability to give patients often life-transforming
treatment.
"The medical care of surgical patients is also interesting
and rewarding and just as important as the surgery itself.
Then there are the personal interaction aspects. Often people
think surgeons don't interact with patients because the
patients are anaesthetised during the operation, but it is
not like that at all."
Prof McCall was specialising in liver surgery when he was
invited to become one of the founding surgeons at this
country's only liver transplant unit, established at Auckland
Hospital in 1998.
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