How my father Influenced my choice of profession – Canada’s leading family physician Doctor Zo

Famous Nigerian-Canadian doctor, Arinze Leonard Onwumelu, known popularly as Doctor Zo, recently offered insights into his background with the new facts supporting his “family man” image.

Doctor Zo, who would be 51 years old in a few weeks on September 16, 2022, said, during a black community interaction in Calgary: “I got married in 2002 shortly after I moved to Dublin, Ireland, to pursue my postgraduate training. I married Barrister Oby Onwumelu who was my girlfriend in the university back in Nigeria. She works as an immigration lawyer in Calgary Canada to date and we are blessed with three lovely children.”

Blessed with three children, the family’s first child is an 18-year-old girl studying Neuroscience at the university, with two brothers, a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old.

“We have been lucky with our children in the sense that they are well-behaved, and we are proud of them,” he told his audience.

A Clinical Assistant Professor at Calgary University well-known as an emergency and family physician in Canada, Doctor Zo attributed his choice of profession to the influence of his family and specifically, to his father.

“Honestly, my father was very key to my choice of Medicine as a course. He would always tell me that he has done business to the highest level, and he would advise me as his first son not to bother with it.  According to him, there are a lot of ups and downs in business but Medicine is certainly more stable and more respectable,” he recounted.

Consequently, he pursued his ambition in the medical field with an unflagging doggedness that saw him abandon Microbiology at the University of Port Harcourt in 1990 after two years of study and spent the next eight years studying Medicine at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

“I completed my university education in 1998 due to a lot of ASUU strikes.  It was supposed to be a six-year course, but we did it for eight years due to the strikes,” Doctor Zo reminisced.