Discussions

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.

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.