EDMONTON – After living with a bad heart for decades, a troubling year unable to access adequate emergency care, and a lifetime serving as his son’s personal and political inspiration, Dr. Raj Sherman’s father, Kirti Kuman Sherman, died this past weekend age 73.
Sherman will be returning to India soon to be with family and honour his father, who had a master’s degree in political science and was the first in the family to come to Canada, where he worked in a B.C. lumber mill.
His father’s story has driven Sherman on his quest for better emergency care for Albertans.
Five times over the last year, Sherman’s father almost died after waiting hours on a stretcher in an ambulance parked outside the University of Alberta Hospital, which has a world-class heart institute. With only 10 per cent of his heart working properly, Sherman’s father was left foaming at the mouth and needed a machine from paramedics to keep him from suffocating, Sherman told The Journal late last year.
After each time, Sherman took his concerns to the caucus table and spoke “very vociferously” to the inner circle. He also phoned Alberta Health Services’ former CEO Stephen Duckett to tell him his father had almost died due to delays in access.
“If this has happened to my dad and I’m a doctor and I’m the junior health minister, I’m not asking for special care,” Sherman said. “I know every paramedic and every front-line doctor knows, this is happening to other people’s mothers and fathers, it’s happening to other people’s children.”
Before he was removed as the parliamentary assistant to Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky and was kicked out of the Tory caucus for criticizing his government, Sherman’s two brothers asked him to resign so he could stay by his father’s side and spend more time with his children.
At each point in his political career, Sherman has turned to his father and his family, seeking their advice.
You can’t go wrong standing up for what’s right, his father told Sherman as he grew up.
Sherman’s father was in his 70s.
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