Henry Fehmi never claimed to be the world’s greatest golfer, although he may be its most passionate.
When he started to spray the ball in all directions on the Magna golf course in Aurora in the fall of 2005, both he and his wife Emine suspected something was wrong.
Henry was too busy running his business, Dominion Spring Industries on Courtney Park Dr. E., to bother making any doctor’s appointments. Like most middle-aged men he was convinced of his own immortality, even though the pains in his head just kept getting worse and worse.
Fehmi had reason to be confident in himself and his business. He was a self-made man and a poster boy for the Canadian immigrant experience. He arrived at Union Station April 27, 1968 with eight British pounds in his pocket and two huge suitcases full of Arctic gear that his mother, back home in Lefka, Cyprus, had packed for him.
“She thought I was going to Iceland. You should have seen the wool socks. They were two inches thick,” he recalled with a laugh in his office Friday.
His wife knew Henry better than Henry, of course. She made a doctor’s appointment in November that was supposed to be for herself and brought her husband along for company. The doctor saw him instead, ordered a CT scan and grimly wrote out a note for Fehmi to pass along to his family doctor.
A baseball-sized 3 cm. thick, 12 cm. long, 10 cm. wide benign tumour had been growing in his head for some time, putting pressure on his brain. The vacation trip to Turkish Cyprus was cancelled, the will was updated and Fehmi started looking at an $80,000 bill to go to New York for immediate surgery. That was before he learned that Trillium Health Centre’s regional neurosurgical centre could do the job promptly right here. Dr. Eric Duncan operated Dec. 9.
As he was being wheeled back to his room after four-and-a-half-hours of surgery, a groggy Fehmi heard some of his attendants chatting about Harold Shipp and a $6 million fundraising challenge.
Later he learned that Shipp’s offer to match contributions to Trillium dollar for dollar up to $6 million had helped inspire George and Anne Ploder to give $1 million to Trillium for a machine that helped provide an intricate pre-surgery picture to surgeons. That is what allowed surgeons to “spot-weld” the arteries in Fehmi’s brain and reduce bleeding during the operation and his recovery time after.
That’s when Fehmi reached for his cheque book.
He gave $10,000 right away and then he gave another $75,000, which is what he would have spent anyway to have the surgery done in the U.S. The money is going for a special retractor that will help Dr. Duncan do the job right and allow other patients to recover as Fehmi has.
“What is money if I don’t share it with people?” he says.
The 59-year-old Credit Pointe resident is still taking it easy a year after his surgery, no longer obsessing over every decision at his business, and thinking about making a large donation to the hospital near his hometown in Cyprus. The hospital just happens to be surrounded by a golf course.
That sounds like the perfect spot for a generous Cypriot expat who plans to spend a lot of time in future travelling and perfecting his golf game.