M.D. Phenom
Dr. Christine Fukui, winner of a national award, is constantly on the go — treating patients and running a hospital department, not to mention running marathons
By Alice Keesing
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Dr. Fukui with, from left, nurses Sara Vaifale and Sun
Takaki, and pulmonary tech Cathy Castro
The giant, homemade poster on Dr. Christine Fukui’s office door says it all: “World’s Greatest Doctor,” “M.D. Phenom,” “Incredible,” “Awesome” it trumpets in bold, colorful letters.
The chief of pulmonary medicine at Kaiser Hospital was recently given the poster by one of her patients. It’s a good example of the kind of enthusiasm that she’s generated in her patients and colleagues during her 26 years at Kaiser. And the American Thoracic Society just joined her fan club, too, naming her the country’s outstanding clinician of the year.
“This is a big award,” says Dr. Joe Pina, president of the Hawaii chapter of the American Thoracic Society.
Exactly how big becomes clear when you consider that, to win the award, Fukui rose to the top of an international membership of 17,000 doctors.
Pina says Fukui was a shooin because of her outstanding care of her patients, and also because of the way she stretches the rest of her time to accomplish a seemingly endless string of activities.
“She’s done it all,” he says. Apparently so. Fukui is a top doc and one of the most respected physicians in the state. She volunteers tirelessly at the local and national levels of the Thoracic Society and the Lung Association. She constantly island hops to take care of patients on the Neighbor Islands. She teaches in the UH system. She’s a wife and mother. She can dance hula. She’s run the Honolulu Marathon. And she’s been known to venture out with that madcap group of runners called the Hash House Harriers.
Dr. Christine Fukui reviews X-rays of lungs at
Kaiser-Moanalua
Not to mention that she accomplishes it all with a very unruf-fled elegance. The nurses in her department were thrilled to hear Fukui would be on the cover of MidWeek.
“She’s one heck of a woman,” says RN Teri Loui. “You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”
The morning MidWeek visited with Fukui, she’d just come out of procedure in which her patient came close to coding. As she handled the interview, she fielded calls on her pager, looked up sources and followed up on her morning patient - all without breaking stride.
Fukui is bursting at the seams with energy, but also has the seemingly contradictory ability to put people completely at ease.
“I think the thing that I really like about her is that she’s smart,” says Gail Toma, who has been a patient of Fukui’s for 26 years. “And she’s a very caring person. There are those bright people who just don’t have any compassion, but she has this all together.”
Over the years, Toma has been struck by how well Fukui knows her patients, so that she understands their lives and not just their medical condition.
Pina describes Fukui as an expert in her field, but says she’s also a tenacious advocate for her patients.
“I’ve seen her stand by patients who are very sick, there’s not much hope for them, but she goes out of her way to take care of them,” he says. “She may not be able to cure them, but she does what she can to make their lives better.”
Ironically, Fukui didn’t plan to be a doctor. At first she thought she might be an engineer - and remember, this was a time when her girlfriends were being told it was perfectly OK to stay home and forego any kind of career.
Fukui was born in Captain Cook on the island of Hawaii. Eventually her family moved to Honolulu, where Fukui attended University Lab School. For college, she went to Earlham College in Indiana - a place she remembers as an oasis of calm while other university campuses were embroiled in protests against the Vietnam War.
While there, Fukui decided that her love of science could perhaps be turned to medicine. She volunteered at Queen’s Medical Center one summer to test drive the concept.
“Queen’s ER has all kinds of people ... genuinely crazy people, schizophrenics, besides the trauma, so it was an interesting and exciting place to be,” Fukui
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