Maureen had made a unilateral decision to continue on in Pediatrics. She felt that I’d betrayed her by leaving surgery. She certainly had no plans for country medicine or going to Africa. With my being away so much she’d consolidated her plans to be a pediatrician and have a practice with his twin sister. This had been there longer standing dream. She was a feminist. Her family had been communist. She called herself agnostic and wasn’t even sure she wasn’t an aetheist. She loved nature.
She was going to be a pediatrician and we were going love in the city. I certainly was rethinking my future. Every doctor I knew was having trouble with the administration in the city. No beds, rationing resources. I was headed north and enrolled in a community medicine fellowship.
We lived to canoe and cross country ski back in those days. My fondest memories of Manitoba are canoeing. Taking others along with us to camp in the northern wilderness was my joy. I loved tenting. I loved the campfire. I loved barbecuing steaks over an open fire. I loved boiling potatoes and making bacon and eggs on the Coleman camp stove. I’d done the Winnipeg River white water canoeing with my friend Jon.
At graduation we’d decided as a group of doctors to go white water canoeing. There were 4 of us, 2 canoes, ice on the water. I’d save the life of one of the guys when their canoe flipped in the rocks and rapids. He popped out at the bottom and we rushed to him. His mate made shore but he was struggling.I caught him and pulled him in. I got a fire going immediately and we had his clothes off and a towel around him.
“I’ll give you anything for a fire,’ he kept saying between chattering teeth.
We’d had our California friends come up for a week of canoeing. My brother had a cabin in lake of the woods, a classic A frame with a lovely wood veranda. We began and ended our trek there. I liked portaging out of the main lakes where there were power boats into these secluded quiet lakes where only a loon’s call broke the silence. We saw bear and raccoon and lots of swans and ducks and geese. Otters and beaver along the side of the lakes. I caught pike from the rocks casting. We skinny dipped. The girls were beyond playboy. Such beautiful young women. We were all so healthy and athletic and vigorous. It was so much frolicking fun. At night we’d make love in the tent night bird and animals sounds coming from the woods to join our sounds.
A young bear poked it’s nose into the tent in the middle of the night pushing the mosquito netting before him. I woke to the sound, Maureen sleeping beside me. On one elbow I used all my might to punch him right in the nose. Bear are sensitive there. He backtracked and was gone in a minute. Maureen stirred at the sound.
“What was that?”
“Squirrels’.
We’d been woken by squirrels jumping on the tent before. She went back to sleep. I never told her about the bear.
Miles was a writer and editor I’d get together with him for one of our writer’s circles.
Previously I’d met with these two girls and a fellow who’d go on to be on the Canada Council for literature. We’ meet every few weeks and each read stories and poetry. The beautiful talented sisters had set that one up.
Later I’d meet with Miles and a couple of others. We’d have beers while Miles did his laundry, the pub stratigically attached to a laundry, favourite place of the young men. The rule was the person who had the best rejection slips had his beer bought by the group. Miles got his rejection from New Yorker and we were impressed. I was rejected by Playboy and Reader’s Digest. When ‘feminist’ Margaret Atwood claimed she had nothing to do about her ‘feminist’ writing appearing in Playboy all the writer’s laughed uproariously. Everyone knew that Playboy paid the most in the industry which was why more starving writers tried to get published in Playboy than any other journal. Margaret Atwood was an artist but Like Suzuki she always had her eye on the money.
Some artists like money a whole lot. Others’ not so much. Margaret Atwood has always liked money a whole lot. Nothing wrong with it. But really, “I was a victim of my agent. He made me publish in Playboy.” Classic feminist. Whining Gloria Steinem shit.My female doctor friend loathed them, “rich privileged white girls who don’t have enough at the top they need to steel the limelight from the bottom claiming they’re victims too. I hate feminists.”
“Margaret Atwood had started out at a great writer. We all so admired until she became a propagandist. A bit like the city Toronto. Once a lovely place, now as corrupt and urban as New York and LA.” One of the guys in our writer’s circle critiqued.
Meanwhile we were drinking cheap beer in a pub attached to a laundromat. Dissecting writers and writing was a a great time. Miles was funniest man alive. Droll. . He was a friend of Franks. Frank was the doctor who assisted surgery. He’d be one of several people who’d meet at the dinner parties that Maureen and I had at our place.
We had bought the new house.
“It’s a good house. The roof and wiring are good. The foundation is solid.” Dad had approved.
It was a bungalow on Oxford in Riverheights. We’d love it. I had the hard wood floors installed that I love so much. Several houses later I’ve always had hard wood floors. We had a friend Gord who did fine wood work. We loved his wood furniture, clean simple lines. I loved wood. Gord was a master. Like my friend today Nick. I often wished I’d stayed a carpenter. I sometimes dream of having a studio and just making furniture. Nothing could be more joyful.. I love the smell of wood. I love the grains. I love wood. I’ll bet Jesus wished he’d stayed a carpenter.
So Gords’ cabinets and tables adorned our new house. We’d order a piece and wait patiently. The table was a masterpiece. Oak and long and sweet. Maureen ,thanks to our California friends mostly ,developed a sophisticated taste for interior design. It became increasingly a problem because I was excluded from her equations.
“It’s a pink house, Bill. She has you in a pink house. You don’t belong in a pink house. She wants to castrate you and hang you on the basement walls.” My friend told me.
My friends talked to me like that. I felt bull dozed on lots of decisions about the decor of the house. I loved the foundation and roofing and wiring and all the solid stuff but then there’d be these pink walls.
“They’re peach.” She exclaimed.
“Can you get rid of those pictures.” She demanded.
The pictures she referred to were a picture of a polar bear and three cubs eating a seal. I’d walked up to it with a regular camera and taken the picture at 10 feet. It was used by the Manitoba government for a travel brochure. Polar bears rarely have three cubs. The mother earlier in the day had chased me when I was out bird watching looking for the famed Ross Gull. Because a biologist had been studying the polar bear with three cubs he saw the Cub take an interest in me and the mother following as I was backing away certain I was dead. Like Evil Keneeval this guy on his motorcycle had charged down the coast leaping boulders and come along side me.
“Get on!” He screamed. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I literally leaped on as the bear broke from a walk to a charge almost catching us on the sand where traction was not so good. . I swear I felt her hot breath on my neck. Later that day I’d find her and her cubs eating the seal. Trusting she was preoccupied with dinner and the kids I got up close and took the greatest wildlife picture of my life.
The other was a beluga whale. I got that up close from a dinghy at high speed in the Arctic Ocean. The other was a bull moose I’d chased through the marsh on our trip to Yellowstone Park. He’d stood 10 feet from me and I’d got the picture. I’d escaped one charge before to get that picture.
“They don’t belong in the house. You can put them in the basement. I don’t like all the wildness.”
I remember calling my dad up after that. Her tone of voice, superior, judgemental and dismissive got in my craw. I mostly just did as she told me. Best not to argue with her. My Dad had invited me hunting with him.
“Adell doesn’t let Ron come hunting since she had the babies. She’s quite the little mother that one.” He’d say.
He was still duck hunting and wanted me to come along. Mom was glad I’d finally agreed to go because he’d be safer and we’d really have the time of our lives. I also figured if Maureen was going to object to pictures of wildlife I might as well get back to killing. There was no compromise with her. I decided then to draw a line in the sand. Granddad hunted, Dad hunted. Ron had hunted. We were all birdwatchers and loved wildlife. But if pictures of wildlife offended her suddenly I was not giving any more ground.
I felt that my wife was becoming impossible. Everything was a matter of ‘give an inch and then she’d take a mile.’ There was no compromise. She was just inexorably moving me to the basement. I was always wrong. She was always right. She would only know set backs but she never changed her mind. I know today that’s classic alcoholic family business but then it was just royally annoying. Impossible to live with.
I liked that we’d have dinner parties and people would ask about the pictures and I’d get to share ‘my stories’ about the north. After we bought the house with the money I made working as a general practitioner and flying each week to the north while she was doing a residency I’d like to talk about those northern trips. I was writing stories for the Medical Post about being a fly in doctor in Northern Manitoba and Northern Ontario.
“My mother calls you a throw back. No one wants to hear about polar bears coming into in hospitals or you going down white water rivers with a bunch of stupid doctors. Grow up. People want to talk about the theatre. My friends don’t want to hear about what you’re doing . We like to discuss food and fashion. You’re a bore. Everything you do is so juvenile. I don’t want those wild pictures of bear in my sight. It upsets me and it upsets my friends.”
The only one who was ever upset was her mother.
Dad and I borrowed my brothers Irish setter Tartan. He’d a couple of rug rats who ‘d grow up to be my great nephews. At the time they were in diapers doing that high speed crab routine across the floor to attack the dogs. Tartan loved being a baby body guard but when Dad and I showed up to take him hunting he was in dog heaven.
So we all drove to the marsh with Dad’s truck. He laughed at me because I shot a mallard and Tartan thought the water too cold. So I undressed to my skivvies and swam out to retreive the duck with Tartan swimming beside me and my Dad laughing on the shore hands on his need hardly able to get a breath. I swam back and Tartan accompanied me. He thought this was a great sport but when it came to him fetching the birds on his own he would always look to me wanting ‘us’ to do the fetching together. I’ve fetched birds a couple of times to get the dog going but it’s not my main duty. Fall marshes and rivers are freezing.
When we had a half dozen ducks each we came home. Tartan who had endless energy was surprisingly mellow. He’d had the day of his life and would love his future breaks from baby sitting duty. He loved the nephews but days off with Dad and me were the best. Rainy the female setter was just as happy to stay home with her hairless puppies.
I brought the ducks in and deposited them on the table my friend Gord had made and I’d bought.
“Get them out of the house.” She screamed. It was overly dramatic to deposit them on the dining room table. We’d always pluck them outside before bringing them in. I was making a statement.
“I shot them.” I said.
“I don’t care if you shot them. They don’t belong in a civilized home.”
“I’m going to pluck them and eat them.”
“I’m not.”
So I plucked them in the back yard. I had my friends over for roast duck and I was the ‘hit’ and she was angry, slow simmering angry. Meanwhile my friends had never had wild duck and being connoseiurs truly loved the experience. They laughed too when I told them about Tartan, my father laughing and me swimming with Tartan to fetch the duck.
I’d love making salads, soups and stews and anything that required chopping in the day. Gord had made us a great kitchen with opening to the dining room. I loved our cabinets .I loved the counter . I loved cooking. Maureen liked to make the entre. She loved the praise. The girls competed with their dinners. She had a French recipe book and we’d have sole in white wine and other dishes . I’d do the turkeys and roasts. The wine cabinet came and went. Dinners were ribald affairs with lots of wine and liqueurs and great story tellers. Paul my ex brother in law was a great artist. I had his photographs on the wall. His black and white of the opening of Rocky Horror Picture show would become iconoclastic. Frank would tell of the politics of the day. His family had escaped Checkoslovakia and he really knew his politics. Things he said thirty years ago have all told true.
“The communists just want control of the world. They’re into power and dominance. They’re a dictatorship really. A gang mentality. They were so angry when the ‘workers unite’ didn’t work. They actually thought all the workers of the world would rise up and want them to lead. IT was a major disappointment . So now they’re into saving the planet. They’re trying to re tool to be environmentalists and say ‘planet lovers unite’ so they can get control and have all the power and money and be the dictators. I don’t think they’re going to get people to buy into their save the spotted owl and the planet’s dying spiel but that’s their plan. They’re do anything for power and greed. The left is all about dictatorship but they never tell you that. You learn when you live under rule.“.
I remember Frank telling us that back in the early 80’s . The Latvians and White Russians had told me about the left killing hundreds of millions. It was Frank who told me the communists were retooling as environmentalists promoting fear so people would accept dictatorship.
We sure laughed a lot though. The girls at those parties were always dressed well as we guys put on sports jackets. Genteel affairs. Discussions of movies and books. Talk of medicine and rotations.
I’d begun flying to Churchill. I’d be up there a week or two at a time. The routine I’d eventually mainly be in was to fly Island Air to Island Lake and then from Island Lake take a bush plane to St. Theresa Point and Wasagamach. The bush planes were my taxi. Mostly I’d fly in the Cezna, single prop and sometimes the lovely Twin Otter. My favourite was the Dehavilland Beaver. I’d eventually fly to a dozen other reserves and locations in the next couple of years. When I stopped flying north full time after one to two years I’d continue to make week long trips every month or two as a consultant.( Later as a psychiatrist in BC and the Yukon I’d fly consults to Northern BC and the Indian Reserves upthere. Even later when I worked in the Northern Marianas Islands I’d fly consult trips to the little polynesisan islands.)
I delivered twins in Churchill. It was an Inuit lady. I delivered her 11th and 12th baby. We didn’t know about the 12th. She was smiling through the delivery mostly. She’d touch me ‘to reassure me’. After the first baby was born I was acting like it was over but she smiled and wagged her finger at me and sure enough she delivered a second one. Then she smiled contented ly. But despite the placenta being full out without any missing bits and the oxytocin going full out she was continuing to hemorrhage. She motioned me to come to her side then she took my hand and pushed it down on her belly motioning me to kneed her uterus in slow circular motions. I was stimulating the uterus to close by expelling blood clots. She smiled after that and glowed when she had her two new babies on her chest.
One day I was dog with a bone down his gullet. I was doing the veterinary work in the north suturing dogs after fights with wolves and now this bone. My colleague , the anesthetist and I , decided the sigmoidoscope was the answer. We sigmoidoscoped the dog under anesthetic. I operated the scope and my friend passed the gas. I never saw a bone but we must have dislodged it. The dog recovered but the hospital administrator didn’t.
He went ballistic.
“You can’t used a human sigmoidoscope on a dog.”
“Do you know what the sigmoidoscope is? “ My anesthetist colleague asked. “It’s for the asshole. if anyone should complain it’s the dog!”
We d autoclave it so was good as new ffor human asshole.
I was dealing with major medical and surgical issues and administration was always up to it’s old tricks looking for irrelevancies and turning them into major issues. They always wanted to be the Center of attention and wanted to move the patients doctors and nurses right out to make the hospitals a perfect place for the cleaning staff and themselves. They liked the x ray machine dusted and thought that was more important than the cardio pulmonary resuscitations we were doing a lot of . Diabetes was a big deal in this populations. I was being flown out to little reserves and once over to the Inuit on the islands in the bay of Churchill.
I’d write a lot about this in the Medical Post and other journals. I’d have time free in the evening and enjoy writing about the experiences. It was a great time. I’d come back home to Maureen and her mother and all the problems in her family, the older brother’s drunken divorce, the depressed communist intellectual brother in the mother’s basement not getting a job, her concerns about academics. IT was okay but the north was exciting and home was not so. I had a lot of academic work in the city too formal community medicine courses and lots of reading. Maureen was doing the same. We weren’t going to the library but studying in the homestretch Gord’s table or in the second room we’d made into a library.
I’d eventually build a small consultation therapy room in the basement and see patients there. Maureen was always worried about money. She didn’t do anything herself but complain and I worked three jobs making us rich by others standards.
I’d be attacked by dock workers in Churchill and almost be killed . 6 of them. A little East Indian Internist who came up to the waist of one would try to stop him kicking me. Because I had martial arts experience and being a gymnast I actually ‘kipped’ to my feet and was upright ready to fight. The drunken thugs attacked the doctors and nurses in the north.They broke up the bars and lounges. But the judge would do nothing. He fined these guys who 6 on one tried to kill me.
The nurses had taken me for a drink to thank me for all the good medicine I’d been doing, They really appreciated competence and I certainly was getting a reputation for that. The dockworkers told the judge ‘this guy had all these babes to himself and we figured if we got rid of him we’d get all the girls. ‘. The biggest guy rabbit punched me. He’d sat down at the next table with his mates and were insulting the nurses so we just got up to go. No one had even spoken with them. I was standing to go and his well planned rabbit punch caught me completely unaware, lifting me, flying, like in cowboy movie, over the length of the 6 foot table, land ing on my back on the bar room floor. Then the six cowards swarmed me, surrounding me, putting the boots to me. That’s when I saw the Lilliputian Indian internist jump on the back of the big guy to be swatted away like a fly. They were trying to kick me in the head but I was swivelling and taking the kicks in the kidneys. Probably the source of my later kidney bleeding episode. I’d protected my head but I was on my feet with a kip that shocked them especially as I came up with my fist dduking it out. Seeing that little East Indian internist on the shoulders of this big bruiser was worth the flight through air.
The police were outside and rushed in When I tried to hold one guy the police pulled me off, ‘we’re trying to help. If you touched him he could charge you with assault. Here these guys had tried to kill me or at least leave me a fork with a head injury and my touching one guy could get me charged with assault. Everyone in the town apologised to me but the judge seemed in league with the criminals.
My back sure hurt from kicks but I was glad I’d saved my head. 6 on 1 , these sociopaths had done this before and would do it again. In another world I’d hoped I’d have hunted them down one one one and beat the shit out of them in the dark alone not letting them know who I was and giving them no warning. I like karma and have volunteered for service in the great chain of karma in my time.
This time I left it with the judge who took their excuse that they needed to let off steam saying they went out to ‘fuck or fight’ and only made them pay for my broken glasses., they’d ground under their boots. He also said doctors and nurses shouldn’t leave the hospital .
Most of the judges I’d work with would have some smarts but in the north it was evident they themselves were terrified. The RCMP were few and far between and frankly I just figured the judge was a coward who gave into the bullies to protect himself. Also he was jealous of doctors and nurses , the hospital being absolutely necessary while he was a pretty much an accessory. Churchill was a Wild West town. The law happened then and there .Judges were always talking about distant yesterdays . The dead piled up regardless of them. Their presence was only a reminder there was this other world outside the community. The natives and everyone else would pay back the dock workers. That’s the way it worked. I knew you didn’t attack doctors 6 on 1 and hit nurses and get away with it. Inuit don’t like that. Cree don’t like that. I’d be surprised if the ring leader lived to finish that year. And maybe the judge knew that too.
Judges are canny guys so while I was pissed at only having my glasses paid for and getting assaulted with no compensation, Churchill was a pretty great town with lots of great people and it grew so the law was doing a good job or that would n’t be true. The thing about the judges is that they had a more birds eye view of what was happening and generally did a good job with the extra insight. I was really for the RCMP especially in the north where they were the greatest allies. We knew the law was an ass but everyone worked together to maintain civilization in the wilderness. I’d lived. Maureen was angry and it would continue to be hard for the Northern Medical Unit to recruit people to the north because doctors and nurses other than me had suffered from the low life.
It was dangerous back but decades later a young female doctor would go north and write about her experiences, it sure sounded a lot tamer and suburban, She didn’t get the RCMP riding the moose down the street having tried to cut its throat only to have it stand up with him then shooting himself in the thigh itch his revolver before shooting the moose really dead. Civilization just keeps spreading.
Indeed they’d not been able to recruit a Canadian doctor to the north despite 2 years of advertisements and major incentives. Churchill befcause it was a hospital centre could get locums but not the nursing stations. Finally Jack got an Irish doctor and an English doctor to join me.
We’d all do northern wilderness training making Igloos and Quincies and being stalked by polar bears. Thanks to my Irish colleague I’d drink a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky in an Igloo we’d made ourselves,with him and others singing Irish revolutionary songs in the arctic. He’d go onto marry a beautiful Native princess. I smile as I remember this time and those days. We were so young and it was so crazy.
I’d be in a couple of plane crashes too. The DC 3 flipped on its side landing crushing it’s wing. I’d hang from my seat belt sideways in the plane till the ordeal ended. .
I’d be stalked and chased by polar bear more than once. Our skidoo would go through the ice on a mercy run. I’d write these stories up and see them published time and again. They really helped Jacks recruiting efforts. He asked me to make an album of pictures they’d use for recruitment. I’d do interviews like the television one I did for recruiting doctors to the country for CBC.
The joke was that me walking along with stethescope and whit lab coat became favoured CBC stock footage so I’d hear from my parents who always watched the news that I’d been shown time and again where the doctor story was positive or negative. The trouble with being photogenic with an acting background.
I’d have Indians try to kill me several times. “Kill the whitey. Kill the whitey” That’s a cry that sends chills through me especially if they’re shooting guns at me or chasing me with knives. Running through reserves with drunken mobs chasing the doctor and the sober Indians trying to rescue me. Drunks love their entertainment.
Maureen didn’t like any of that. We were growing more and more apart.
I had also arranged with Dr. Hildes that my years up north would be coupled with a Community Medicine Residency with Dr. French. So I’d be studying and taking classes when I wasn’t flying up north. I’d complete two years of Community Medicine as it was. Thanks to that I studied all the Canadian health care acts and all the laws and all the statistics and did epidemiology, public health and social policy. Id’ complete a year of anthropology of aboriginal North America too.
In Churchill I did two clinics and saw a hundred patietns a week. There were three of us doctors there. On the reserves though Jack wanted me to be solely a consultant. He said I must never see a patient without a nurse present because my role was to teach the nurses not do their work. HE was adamant about that because they’d be there alone without me around when I flew back to the city. Some reserves would only have a doctor once a month for a few days leaving the nurses alone the rest of the time .
Some of the nurses didn’t like that because they wanted us doctors to do the clinics letting them have more holiday time. I showed them I could see fifty people in a morning and when they accompanied me to a remote reserve I’d see a hundred or more in the hours of daylight the planes could fly in but if they didn’t want to use me as a consultant I just sat studying community medicine texts while they did the well baby stuff. Teaching is always harder and slower. I’m a good enough teacher. Not terribly patient. Maureen was a great teacher, one of the best I’d ever know, We’d been blessed to have the best of teachers. But I only really liked to teach the keen. On my own I got things done efficiently and the way I liked them done.
I ‘d be on 24 hour call 7 days a week to radio phone. I’d get these calls in the middle of the night and advise on emergencies. It was all very exciting. The medicine and emergency decisions and calls were all very easy by now. I’d just become very experienced in a very short time. We used to say that a year of country medicine was like 5 years of city medicine. None of my urban colleagues had even done a spinal tap. I’d done literally dozens and dozens. I’d diagnosed TB and syphilis and all manner of rare things plus the garden variety stuff. I was the only doctors thousands of people saw for years. It was an immense responsibility but an incredible training experience. The best part was that Jack had such a great relationship with the university that everyone I called for advise took it as an honor to be helping the Northern Medical Unit. We were world reknowned. I was personally well known and well liked. I don’t think Maureen liked that.
Maureen was always competing with me. I found women doing this and I didn’t compete with women. It was always a no win game for men. But I didn’t compete so much as compete against myself and increasingly clinically just want to get the job done and save a life. I was way out of the academic political scene and she was in it big time, Her family were that way and my family wasn’t. At the university hospital everyone was still comparing and competing.
I had this high status simply because I was working with Jack HIldes and the Northern Medical Unit. I was publishing my stories across the country and was known. Maureen was being a good pediatrican and academic. I was on tv and in the public eye and she was doing what she said she wanted to do work in the hospital. I was a shining light. She was a star. I was never ‘jealous’ of her but she would make these weird comparisons. She’d always knock what I was doing. I never put her work down. I always celebrated her achievements but she was always negating anything I did. Constant back stabbing belittling and comparison. It was painful. Always low key and always insinuating.
She was never interested in sex anymore. Claimed she was always tired. But never too tired for listening to her mothers ad infinity calls. She was always so depressed after that. The woman could have sucked the soul out of Mary. Maureen was depressed a lot with her father drinking heavily and her parents physically fighting and her mother always emotionally extorting Maureen,
I’d be between her legs for years before she’d let me mount and then she’d get upset she was ‘messy’. Sperm was ‘messy’. And she’d not talk about having children. She even suggested adopting but ‘why adopt’. “I’d like us to have kids”. Her sister and her husband were Christians and family was more important. She was into feminism and always angry. Before her mother and Pediatrics she’d been this wonderfully happy wild person who loved sex. Now it was work except when we’d get away from her mother spend some time holidaying together then the marriage would come back, the chronically demanding depressed angry mother wouldn’t be there and we have love and sex and laughter. I so envied her sister and her husband getting away from the drunken angry home with all the drama.
I loved the north. I loved being ‘necessary’. I loved ‘service’. I loved the adventure. I’d go through the ice on a ski doo and walked 10 miles wet and frozen with polar bear stalking us and my ski doo driver saying.
“I don’t like the look of that brute but don’t run or they’ll be on us.”
“I cant’ run. My clothes are frozen from the water.” He laughed at that.
We laughed and sure were glad to get the village when the polar bears veered off and left us. I saved the life of a child there. An old man had had a stroke and I could take care of him too. It was so fulfilling to know that feeling of being ‘necessary’. In the north it wasn’t about being the very best doctor, I was good, but it was about being there. They just needed people who cared about them. No one did. It was terrifying at time. The drunken Indian chasing me about the emergency with an axe. These aren’t the things that make people want to be a northern doctor. But we all cared. There was this amazing young woman doctor who was brilliant and she just loved the ‘medicine’. “Where else can I see al the stages of tuberculosis. I can’t work in the south. It’s too boring. Here I’m seeing everything. Here I’m right in the centre of medicine. “ She was the old 19th century doctor who loved to diagnose and treat and she was amazing. I loved working with her. After Churchill she went even further north to work with the Inuit.
It was great times. I was early days. Lots of people would follow. Jack Hildes opened the door. Now there’s lots going north but it was 2 years before they could get me and they had to take an Irish and an English doctor before years later they’d get more Canadians willing to go north.
I loved it. I’d always jump to serve ‘where the greatest need was’. There’s so much fulfillment and the other people working there are there because like you they’re a bit ‘touched’.
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