This International Day of Older Persons, AnglicareSA celebrates its almost 5,000 customers across our residential and community aged care services.
Our customers have lived rich and interesting – raising families, pursuing careers, and contributing to their communities – and that does not stop when they move into a residential aged care home or access supports and assistance at home.
We recognise and acknowledge the important contributions our older customers have made and continue to make in our community, just like Ken who lives at our Elizabeth East residential aged care home.
Described by vascular surgeon Dr Alan Scott as a “remarkable surgeon and a truly remarkable Australian”, Dr Ken Clezy, AM, OBE, is no stranger to the harsh realities of human life.
A doctor for more than 50 years, and a surgeon for nearly as long, Ken’s work surgically reconstructing deformities caused by leprosy was internationally regarded and renowned.
Born in 1929, John ‘Ken’ Clezy V was born into a long line of Johns (the tradition would continue with his son and grandson, John VI and VII), the first being his great-great-grandfather back in the 1800s.
The oldest of four children, Ken was born into a religious family and grew up on a farm in Naracoorte in the state’s South-East.
It became obvious as a child that farm work wasn’t in Ken’s future – in his memoir Now in Remission: A Surgical Life, he wrote:
“By the time I was knee high, anyone with half an eye could see I’d never be a farmer.”
Listening to a minister and missionary in his last year of schooling cemented Ken’s life purpose.
“I felt God calling me for overseas service,” Ken said.
And so, Ken embarked on a medical degree, with the aspiration of becoming a doctor and working overseas in disadvantaged communities lacking access to health care.
Throughout his professional career, Ken travelled and worked as a surgeon in various countries, and sometimes, it was dangerous.
Ken will never forget his experience working in a hospital in Yemen during the Second Gulf War.
On one fateful day, Ken narrowly escaped death when three of his colleagues were killed at the hospital. Ken’s saving grace: going home for breakfast.
Ken said working in low and middle-income providing urgent healthcare and performing vital surgeries could be challenging at times, but his strong sense of faith and calling compelled him to continue serving others.
“I wanted to do something that could help people; Ken said.”
“Seeing all sorts of ailments and doing different operations to help people was something I enjoyed.”
While Ken retired from medicine in 2005 after an illustrious career, that didn’t stop him from keeping busy, penning several novels and his memoir.
As Ken aptly put it in his memoir: “I couldn’t dodge the fact that I was another surgeon who… was reluctant to lay down the scalpel.”
You can read more about Ken’s incredible life as a surgeon in low and middle-income countries in his memoir, available to purchase at Wakefield Press.