Doctor has a busy schedule

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Shay Bintliff is who you want to be when you grow up. Or more precisely, how you want to be.

She lives her life, does her thing, helps people.

She's 66 years old. She just finished her 21st paddle across the Moloka'i channel. She was featured in a popular video documentary called "Surfing for Life" alongside legends like Rabbit Kekai, John Kelly and Anona Napoleon.

She owns a sandalwood farm and a bed-and-breakfast. She has performed stand-up comedy on a nationally televised show. She writes a regular column about humor and life for a community newspaper.

She's served on boards and commissions and spoken up about issues she believes in, like same-sex marriage. She's mom to two sons and doting grandmother to a little girl who's taken a shine to surfing.

And oh yeah, she's a doctor.

Shay Bintliff went to medical school at a time when everyone assumed a woman's only place in medicine was in nursing. She was recruited to teach at the brand new School of Medicine at UH-Manoa in 1964. She had her two sons while she was in medical school, and they were just 3 1/2 and 18 months old when they came to Hawai'i. Years later, when both boys were grown, Bintliff refocused her medical career from specializing in birth defects to emergency medicine. She now lives in Waimea, Hawai'i, and commutes to Waimea, Kaua'i, where she is head of emergency medicine at the Kaua'i Veterans Memorial Hospital.

Bintliff says she learned early on that humor helped to get her point across. Eventually, she worked up an act based on her experiences in medicine, with lines like, "I'm sure some of my jokes will die on stage, but at least no one will sue me."

She won a contest at the Honolulu Comedy Club and a slot on a network comedy half-hour.

"It was fun, but it's not my primary calling. For me, it's always been doctoring. Even when I was a little kid, it was so clear to me I was going to be a doctor."

It seems a dichotomy, a person so full of life and humor drawn to work in a place where fear and death come sweeping through the door.

But for Dr. Bintliff, it's all part of the same whole. And though she does believe laughter is the best medicine, her guiding principle is to listen to her patients.

"Some of them are dying and they know it and they're OK with it. Some of them are scared. Some of them are in denial and they don't want you to talk them out of it. I try to be with them where they are."

For those who would aspire to the kind of balance she has achieved between ambition and service, humor and reverence, work and play, Dr. Bintliff offers this advice:

"Don't be totally focused on yourself, but take care of yourself so that you in turn can take care of others. I have a strong belief in living my life congruently, in being who I am as I walk in this world."

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com