I GOT INTO FAMILY MEDICINE in a roundabout way. In my 20s, I did my graduate studies in philosophy in the United States. After that, I spent nine years working in management and software consulting, which had me on the road nearly 50 weeks of the year. In 2002, my husband accepted a teaching position at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, so we decided to move to nearby South Frontenac township. At that point, I was 39 years old and had grown disenchanted with my career. I wanted to travel less and make a difference in my community. Even back then, I was reading stories about a shortage of family doctors, so in 2009, I enrolled in Queen's School of Medicine.
I was the only first-year student with kids: ours were five and one, and our third came along during my second year. Motherhood forced me to become really good at time management. For four years, I diligently chipped away at my assignments, forgoing parties and social events in favour of time with my young family. After another two years of residency, I completed my studies in 2015. The year after I graduated, I was recruited by a clinic in Verona, a 2,000-person town a half-hour's drive north of Kingston. I was replacing an older woman who was retiring. Despite being one of just two family doctors on staff, each caring for 1,200 patients, it sounded like a dream job. Early on, it was.
Verona is a tight-knit community. Soon after I arrived there, patients began approaching me in public places, like the grocery store, stopping to say hello and, sometimes, asking me about X-ray results.
This story is from the May/June 2023 edition of Maclean's.
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This story is from the May/June 2023 edition of Maclean's.
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So You've Been Hacked - A new generation of ultra-sophisticated cybercriminals are targeting governments, corporations, hospitals and libraries and laying bare how ill-equipped Canada is to fight back
A new generation of ultra-sophisticated cybercriminals are targeting governments, corporations, hospitals and libraries and laying bare how ill-equipped Canada is to fight back.On a July morning in 2022, Brad Hynes, the IT manager for the town of St. Mary's in southwestern Ontario, was backing up the town's computer systems when things went haywire. File names became unintelligible strings of characters. Desktop icons went blank. File after file was impossible to open, a string of digital duds. The background wallpaper on Hynes's screen disappeared, replaced by the red-and-black logo of a Russian ransomware gang called LockBit. A line of all-caps text appeared: All your important files are stolen and encrypted!
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