Valley surgeon celebrates 35 years of practice

PALMER — Mat-Su Regional Medical Center general surgeon Dr. Michael Senta said he’s never once questioned his career choice.

When Dr. Senta was a sophomore in high school, sitting in biology class one day, he told two of his good friends he “was thinking about being a doctor.” Each of his friends said they too wanted to become doctors, and the three decided, in the words of Yul Brynner, “so it shall be written, so it shall be done.”

“Like most (professions), you can’t just flop around and then do it, you have to sort of plan your education and plan your life to grease it so that that laddered process is somewhere between reasonable and easy,” Senta said.

And that’s what they did.

Each went their separate ways for college pre-med programs, after which Senta spent several years in medical school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. After surgery training and his final internship, he was ready to start his residency.

But not before he saw more of the world.

Senta had acquired a taste for travel as an undergraduate when he studied abroad in Germany for a year, and a love of languages when he took Latin, Russian and German electives as a high school student. So, post-medical school, he spent five months as a medical missionary in Kenya, 20 miles from the Uganda border.

That was in the mid-1970s, when former Ugandan president Idi Amin’s “reign of terror,” as the New York Times called it, was in full swing.

“There was a lot of turmoil,” Senta said. “The politics (weren’t) very calm or rational.”

The state of affairs in eastern Africa actually cut short Senta’s planned six-month stay in Kenya, but he spent enough time there to experience the less-than-ideal medical facilities.

While the 125-bed hospital he spent most of his time in was well staffed with nurses and well run by local people, Senta said, there were only two doctors onsite.

“It was pretty shocking,” he said.

The Kenyan hospital also only had two kinds of antibiotics, one of which is no longer manufactured, Senta said.

“Everything was limited,” he said.

But rather than discourage Senta, the observation of hospital care and quality in a developing country reinforced his goals and increased his determination.

“I’d always sorta had that ‘make the world better’ kind of an idea, and I said, ‘when I become a real doctor, then I can maybe do that,’” Senta said.

Which is partially why he came to Alaska. When Senta arrived in 1980, he was the eighth physician and the first specialist in the Palmer area. He has helped build hospitals and recruited young doctors to staff them.

Now there are more than 200 doctors in the Valley, Senta said, plus many more medical professionals. The Valley also has the non-profit Mat-Su Health Foundation, an offshoot of the original not-for-profit Valley Hospital that works in the community to improve the health and wellness of Mat-Su residents.

“There’s just so many things that have improved and so much that we’re able to do now that we never were able to do before. And it’s been really fun being a part of it,” Senta said.

Mat-Su Regional Director of Marketing and Public Relations Alan Craft called Dr. Senta “one of our area’s most influential surgeons,” to which Senta responded, “I think longevity has a lot to do with that.”

With 35 years of medical practice in the Valley, he’s probably right. But his outlook on life, the community and the field of medicine has also made him the unique professional he is today.

He credited the famous chiasmus of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech — “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — as part of the reason for his mentality.

“I (ask), what’s making things better for the community and better for the institution. It’s not so much a ‘what’s in it for me’ deal,” Senta said.

And as long as he continues to love doing what he’s doing — “I still enjoy it, a lot,” he said — retirement can wait.

“I could go at any time, but, eh, I still like it. What the heck,” Senta said.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.