Patient-First Language

I think about certain patients, displaced from the certainties of their lives in their home countries. They have, for complicated reasons, chosen to leave the world they grew up in to make a new life in Canada. The dominant culture here is so foreign, so strange to them. Some are ready to embrace it and go forward, and some are stuck and cannot adjust.

I wouldn’t have thought anything less of my day if the porters had arrived, not said a word and just moved around the various beds and wheelchairs, with us as patients in them, from the required point A to point B. But in the Civic day surgery unit, porters are not just porters, they are Walt Disney magical carpet ride directors.

Who would have thought that it might be good to talk about yourself in the third person? As if you weren’t you, but him? As if you weren’t actually there, and anyway, you didn’t want yourself to find out you were talking about him in case it seemed like, well, gossip? I mean, only royalty, or the personality-disordered, are able to talk like that without somebody phoning the police.

I get to thinking there's at least an opportunity, if not an explicit purpose, in our trajectory toward senescence. On bad days, it freaks me out and I enter my default existentialism that seems to have coloured most of my life, from frantically saving the dying insects on the surface of my childhood pool to contemplating the spirited air that must surround the hallways of our local hospice and its quiet lakeside dock.

We’ve been getting by with virtual care, and during the pandemic, it may be the best option possible given the many constraints we are facing. But we need to recognize and value the relational effort that makes virtual care function. Ultimately, family medicine is built on relationships. It's relationships, in the clinic and in our communities that will get us through this pandemic.

In the summer of 2017, I was the treating emergency physician involved in the care of two Inuit children from Nunavik who were transferred to the Montreal Children’s Hospital (MCH) by Évacuations aéromédicales du Québec (ÉVAQ), the provincially run medical evacuation airlift service. The first child was a preschooler who fell off a moving all-terrain vehicle earlier that morning and was transferred to us with a suspicion of injuries to the abdomen and head.

Proposed legislation to amend Canada’s law on medical assistance in dying goes against the nature of medicine, which is to heal patients and alleviate suffering, says Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician in London, Ont. Dr. Coelho is among a group of physicians who wrote an open letter opposing Bill C-7. More than 800 Canadian doctors have now signed the letter.

The level of amputations has risen for diabetics during the pandemic, he said, as people have been afraid to seek treatment even with telltale trouble signs like numbness in limbs.