Winston Hewitt Jr. excelling as general surgery specialist at the Mayo Clinic
August 30, 2022
Pilot, firefighter and even boxer at one point until punched hard in the face were some of Dr. Winston Hewitt Jr. career considerations.
That quickly changed after a medical episode when he was 12 years old.
Suffering sharp pain in his lower right abdomen, the emergency room physician told Winston Hewitt Sr. that his son had stomach flu that would soon dissipate.
In the next few days, the pain intensified, forcing dad to take his child to their Jamaican-Canadian family physician who immediately diagnosed Hewitt with appendicitis and sent him to the emergency room.
The late Dr. Hugh McGuire performed the surgery at Humber River Regional Hospital.
“I will always remember that name because he was very gentle and kind,” said Hewitt who was raised in the Jane & Finch community. “Up until then, I didn’t trust what anyone was saying. I just knew I was hurting. But, he told me exactly what was going on, why it was going on and what was going to happen going forward.”
While recovering in hospital from surgery, McGuire checked on his young patient daily.
“That was the best part of my day,” recalled Hewitt. “I felt reassured and good. It is very scary when you are going through something like that when you are a child. By the end of that hospital admission, I said that is the job I want to do. I wanted to make people feel the way that this surgeon made me feel.”
He kept his word.
Hewitt is a general surgery specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona that, in the last five years, is among the top 20 hospitals in the United States.
Dr. Winston Hewitt Jr. (l) is a general surgery specialist (Photo contributed)
He specializes in kidney, pancreas and liver transplant.
There are several reasons for Hewitt gravitating to this complex field.
“Transplantation is a very dramatic life-altering surgical procedure,” he said. “It is not cosmetic surgery and not even like cancer surgery which, many times, you take out what you can see. But over the long-term, the cancer still comes back. I was very frustrated by what I saw in that specialty. Transplantation is technically very challenging because you operate on people who have either liver, kidney or diabetic disease. Those patients tend to have other problems that can make the operation very difficult to manage.
“In addition, you are always at the forefront of a lot of scientific, medical and surgical innovations. With the immunosuppressive medications and the kinds of organs you can accept, it is a constantly changing field. It is not as tried and true and predictable as general surgery for example. Then you have the ability to have that instant gratification of an organ that you put blood back through and the patient, who is basically at death’s door, starting to slowly improve and get better. Finally, you have to have your general medical training and knowledge of all the sub-specialties that you have to bring to bear. You feel like a holistic global physician.”
What do Hewitt say to people who have misconceptions about organ donation?
“It is something I always take the opportunity to deconstruct,” he said. “On the organ donor side, that is a whole other system that the transplant system doesn’t get involved in because of a conflict of interest. Most major religious sects have endorsed organ donation as a gift of life and a beautiful thing to do. However, there are still many cultural and social misperceptions and fear that, over time, have been slowly deconstructed.”
Hewitt, who graduated cum laude from Queen’s University in 2004 after being on the Dean’s List at McMaster University five years earlier, has been at the Mayo Clinic since 2011.
After seven years training in Jacksonville, Florida, he was recruited in 2008 to join Emory University to assist with their transplant program.
“It really was not a system that was conducive to my goals and ethics,” said Hewitt who also did pediatric liver transplantation at Mayo for five years until 2016.
Would he consider returning to Canada to practice after spending the last two decades south of the border?
“You never say never, but I don’t think so,” Hewitt pointed out. “When I was coming towards the end of medical school, the way things work is that you have to apply for a residency matching program. Knowing what I wanted, it switched focus from a foundation of medicine and surgery and the sciences to cutting-edge stuff. There are only a few centres in Canada that I would want to go to do that.”
Dr. Winston Hewitt Jr. has been at the Mayo Clinic, ranked among the top 20 hospitals in the U.S, since 2011 (Photo contributed)
The University of Toronto and McGill University were a few options.
“That year, they kept their own medical school graduates which I could understand as Canada is such a small market with few positions,” he said. “I was encouraged to select another specialty and to go into physical medicine and rehabilitation. I thought that was crazy and decided to go somewhere else because I knew what I wanted. I love Canada and it is still my home country, but within the field of medicine and surgery, there is not room for everyone who wants to do it.”
Shortly after he was discharged from hospital and well enough to go the library, Hewitt started researching how to become a doctor.
“We didn’t have the Internet back then and I didn’t know,” the father of two children said. “I had no idea what I had to take in school, so I found a book that allowed me to figure out how many medical schools there are in Ontario and that my greatest likelihood of getting into medical school was to go to those universities for undergrad that had a medical school. I also had to figure out what the requirements were in high school so that I could take the appropriate courses.”
Hewitt completed high school at C.W Jefferys Collegiate Institute after attending Oakdale Park Middle School where his classmates included Cheryl Blackman who is the City of Toronto Interim Manager of Economic Development & Culture and award-winning television journalist Dwight Drummond.
“I have used Winston for years in my motivational speeches to disadvantaged youth as an example of their possibilities,” said Drummond who hosts CBC Toronto News at Six. “What is being said of them was said about us. Jane & Finch has produced lots of people who are making great contributions to society. I personally know many of them because I grew up with them. Our little Oakdale has produced nurses, lawyers, doctors, police officers, politicians, mechanics, electricians and social workers just like other communities. We need to change the narrative. What Winston has accomplished doesn’t surprise me because he has always been brilliant. We are lucky to come from families that really value education. That is part of our West Indian heritage.”
Hewitt’s greatest supporter has been his father who founded the defunct Canadian Reggae Music Awards.
“When you are a child and you say you want to do this, some people laugh and brush you aside,” the avid traveler and sports fan noted. “Dad is not a college or university graduate and he was not going to help me in that way. He was financially supportive, getting me a car to drive to university and that kind of stuff.”
Hewitt’s mother passed away last year.
