A life in the day: Dr. Erin Luxenberg

One constant in Dr. Erin Luxenberg’s daily life is her morning coffee. “I like to savour it,” said the 31-year-old family doctor from Montreal. “It helps me wake up slowly, think about the day ahead.” Half the time, her days begin in Waskaganish, a Cree community of roughly 2,300 people on the southeast shore of James Bay at the mouth of the massive Rupert River. Dr. Luxenberg has been a full-time family doctor there since the summer of 2020, when she completed six months of locums in northern Indigenous communities and a fellowship in Women and Child Health (“that’s my passion,” she said) at McGill University, her alma mater. Read: Making a difference: 10 physicians working to improve healthcare for racialized communities She and two or three physicians, including occasional residents, provide medical services at Waskaganish’s lone clinic, which is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The doctors share both homes and on-call duties to ensure round-the-clock medical care in the community, a 13-hour drive north of Montreal, the last two over gravel roads. The community has no hospital or inpatient ward, nor specialists, labs, X-rays or EMR. “Here we do everything,” Dr. Luxenberg said from Waskaganish, a one-time fur trading post named Fort Rupert, during a two-week stint there in late January. “We do emergency medicine, a walk-in clinic, home care, pre-natal, pediatrics—even palliative care. It’s a varied practice.” In the absence of most modern medical tools, she said doctors must rely and focus on their clinical skills. Most Friday nights, she and other medical members at the clinic share potluck suppers. They also try to do an outdoor activity together over the weekend—from cross-country skiing or snowshoeing in winter to hiking or swimming in summer. “It’s important to get some fresh air,” said Dr. Luxenberg. “It’s beautiful here, with rivers and trees and trails through the forest.” She also likes to exercise at a small gym and do yoga, an activity she’s been doing since age 12 and is currently doing a month-long program online. Though she doesn’t hunt or fish, Dr. Luxenberg said she is willing to try the latter of the two popular and traditional Cree activities “if I get invited, because I don’t know how to do it.” She said she is also learning about Cree culture, history and language from her patients. “It’s great to learn and expand your horizons,” said Dr. Luxenberg. “It’s one of the reasons why I love doing locums and working here.” If home is where the heart is, however, Dr. Luxenberg’s morning coffees are never better than in the apartment she shares with Renaud Dubedout and the couple’s cat in Montreal’s artsy Plateau neighbourhood. When she’s in the city, Dr. Luxenberg works part-time at the Meraki Health Centre. Located just west of downtown, not far from where she was born and raised, the McGill-affiliated clinic has two interdisciplinary programs—pediatrics and gender variance—with a variety of health services and allied therapies. “I work in the gender variance program, which offers hormone therapy and other medical aid and accompanying services for adult transgender patients and people in transition,” she said. A former clarinet player in the Westmount Youth Orchestra who stopped playing in med school at McGill, then sang in a choir during residency, Dr. Luxenberg now spends her free time with Renaud, who works in IT but would like to be an airplane pilot, and with her parents and three younger siblings. “They all miss me when I’m away up north, but they think that what I’m doing is super cool and they’re proud of me,” she said. “And I’ve always got interesting stories to tell when I get home.” Those tales likely won’t end anytime soon as Dr. Luxenberg hopes and plans to continue practicing medicine in Waskaganish and other remote communities for the foreseeable future. “I see myself working in the north, having a family and bringing my child up here sometimes with me—with Renaud as the pilot,” she said, laughing. “I love working here and I look forward to becoming a well known member of the community.”

A life in the day: Dr. Erin Luxenberg

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