NEWBERRY — Newberry County Memorial Hospital has welcomed a new face to their staff, Dr. Stephen Bayuk. He began working at NCMH on Feb. 1.
Bayuk is originally from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. He is a graduate of The College of Wooster and completed medical school at Lake Erie College of Medicine, training at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. For the past seven years, Bayuk has been in private practice in Maryland.
“Where I was it was very rural, Newberry’s a bigger city than where I’m coming from,” Bayuk said. “My wife Kristin is from the Aiken area and I met her through my sister and her husband. Her folks retired to Prosperity about five years ago, we just had a little girl, Anna about a year and a half ago and she wanted to be closer to family so that’s what brought us down to Newberry.”
Bayuk specializes in general surgery which does a little bit of everything from the gallbladder, colon cancer, problems with intestines or colonoscopy’s. March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month and Bayuk encouraged patients to have colonoscopies at age 50.
“I like laparoscopic surgery, I pretty much like socializing with my patients and making sure they get better, that’s the goal. I’ll do whatever I can to get somebody better,” Bayuk said.
Bayuk, who is used to colder weather, said it is very hot in Newberry.
“From what some of the locals have told me, the skiing is below average here. My wife and I were having dinner the other night and we heard something, I hadn’t heard a firetruck in seven years at least not go past the house,” Bayuk said. “I think we’re adjusting well, my wife really loves it here, it’s a great town.”
He added that he has been adjusting well to working alongside his fellow doctors, saying that the transition has been fairly smooth.
“Dr. Conrad Manayan has been great, the operating room has been wonderful in welcoming me and the physicians have also been very open and welcoming and introducing me to the Newberry family, it’s been going very well,” he said.
Bayuk enjoys getting to know his patients, getting them better and seeing them through a difficult time, but said that no doctor likes delivering bad news to a family.
“That never gets easy, it’s one of those things I wish I didn’t have to do,” Bayuk said. “My goal is to hopefully be here long term and raise my daughter here in Newberry. I like to give patients the ability to stay close to home to have surgery, that way they don’t have to travel so far as opposed to driving an hour away for something we can do here.”