GUYSBOROUGH — Looking back, Kevin Rainey still can’t believe how ordinary it all seemed. Annoying, yes: the endless drip, the useless nasal sprays, the Kleenex piling up beside the bed. It had gone on for more than a year. But there was no pain. No one had thought to look deeper.
Then one day in late 2023, as he was leaving an appointment at Guysborough Memorial Hospital, his doctor, Nancy Jean-Marie Benjamin, stopped him at the door.
“Has anyone ever done a CAT scan or an MRI?”
The next day, he was at St. Martha’s in Antigonish. Just a test, he told himself. A nuisance, maybe. On the way out, he and his wife Marie even thought about grabbing lunch at the Claymore. That was before the nurse in charge caught up with them.
“You should see your doctor again at once,” she said urgently. The expression on her face made it clear this was not a suggestion.
Back in Guysborough, Jean-Marie Benjamin pulled up the scan. And there it was: a tumour the size of a golf ball, wedged between the two hemispheres of his brain. “It was just stark, naked shock,” Kevin says now, from his home on Carlson Street in Guysborough.
What happened next wasn’t just a medical drama. It was a different kind of miracle – not just of science, but of place. In the blur of surgeries, snowstorms, and weeks on antibiotics, what stood out most wasn’t the medicine. It was the local people who dug them out, drove them in, and refused to let go.
“If it wasn’t for Nova Scotia,” Rainey says – the small town, the scrappy hospital, the bulldog determined caregivers – “I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
A life remade in Guysborough
After 40 years in the food business – living and working all over Canada and the world – the Cambridge, Ont., born-and-raised former executive with Sobeys Inc. wasn’t the sort to get easily rattled. He’d overseen more than 1,700 bakeries across the country. He had served as president of that sector’s national association, co-led trade missions, and most recently managed bakery merchandising for Save-On-Foods in Langley, B.C.
But, in 2021, feeling battered, he and Marie joined many other weary Canadians in the grand Covid exodus east in search of peace, and found it. “We knew about viewpoint.ca and so we were looking around everywhere,” Marie says. “We were almost going to move to New Brunswick; we were looking at house there. Then we saw this one and we started researching the town. What’s it got? We’d never been to Guysborough before ... We fell in love with the house.”
Life was everything they’d wanted – until the tumour. “I lost it,” Marie says of that day. Adds Kevin: “To understand I had something like that growing in me was an absolute stunner. I’d never been cut open for a surgery, for anything in my life.”
A community that showed up
In fact, there wasn’t just one operation, but four. The first, a craniotomy at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, revealed the full extent of the growth – a benign meningioma pressing against his optic nerves and pituitary gland.
The second came weeks later, when an infection set in. The third and fourth were attempts to reach what surgeons couldn’t safely remove by conventional means – through the nasal cavity, a high-stakes approach that still fell just short.
All told, it was 16 months of neurological intervention, aggressive antibiotics, and persistent uncertainty. At one point, he was on vancomycin – one of the strongest antibiotics available – twice a day, for 16 weeks. “There was a stretch where I couldn’t sleep lying down as my skull healed, so I slept sitting up.
In theory, the intravenous antibiotics could have been administered at home. But winter had other plans. This past February, snowdrifts buried their driveway. Storms came and came again. Missing a dose meant starting the entire cycle over. So, Kevin decided to make the twice-daily trip to Guysborough Memorial Hospital himself.
“They gave us the option [of home treatments] but if, for whatever reason – the weather or the VON nurses couldn’t make it here – my antibiotic cycle would have to start all over again,” he says. “I was more confident that that I would be able to make it down to the hospital.”
Most days, he didn’t go it alone. Neighbours shoveled their walk. Others plowed their driveway. One day, when the car got stuck, a clerk from the grocery store pushed him out. Another time, someone up the street just showed up and drove him in. “It was consistent,” Marie says. “They never changed if we needed help.”
The nurses greeted Kevin like family. They made him laugh, shared stories. “They gave me books to read to take home, and told me about their families, and joked and told other patients that I was going to be an employee there, saying ‘he knows this place better than us ... It was just never-ending kindness from people in Guysborough.”
What rural health care got right
But what struck him and Marie most wasn’t how fast the care came; it was that it came at all.
They’d lived in Mississauga, Brantford, Langley, Chilliwack. he had worked across Canada and abroad. He knew the reputation rural health care carried: thin on resources, slow on referrals, high on risk. He also knew Nova Scotia’s struggles with doctor and nurse shortages, especially in places like Guysborough and Canso.
And yet, that’s not what he found.
“When they needed to give me a CAT scan, it happened right away,” he says. “Even if it doesn’t need to be right away, they have ways and means of getting it done even though you have a population that’s basically the size of Mississauga spread out over an area from [the] Quebec-Ontario border all the way down to Windsor.”
He credits Dr. Jean Marie Benjamin, who first raised the alarm, with refusing to let it slide. And Dr. Derek Godfrey – now his primary care physician – with guiding him through the long road of recovery.
The healing that came after
These days, life has mostly returned to normal. Kevin cuts the grass – two full acres – in long, steady strides, clocking 11,000 steps per mow. Marie’s back at work part-time, caring for children at the local YMCA daycare. Their daughter Nessa, now 26, lives nearby. When he asked her how the post-op scar looked, she told him, “Honestly, Dad? You look kind of badass.”
And while there are still checkups and the odd bout of fatigue, Kevin says the real healing has come in the quiet moments when the depth of what happened to him registers.
“I’ve probably lived in 30 different places in my life,” he says. “The care that I’ve had in Nova Scotia, comparably to other places, is the best.
Marie nods. “We had no idea at the time we moved here who our neighbours would be... but we [found] wonderful [ones] right in Guysborough town.”
Kevin looks out the window. The grass can wait.
“We’ve been lucky,” he says. “Really lucky.”
