MASSALA GRILL – THUNDER BAY . . . 5:30 p.m.

Buffet

THE CONVERSATION

By her own admission Claudette has been catching up on the life stuff that she has fallen behind on. It is hard to imagine how anyone could keep up. She is a family physician in Northern Ontario, a single mother to an adult son recovering from a serious car crash and a passionate advocate for social justice issues in medicine and in northern communities.

“By the time I stopped, I was so exhausted I didn’t miss it. Sometimes that’s the only way I’ll stop. I have to hit the wall.”

Claudette knows that she pushes herself hard. She was working as a nurse and raising a new baby when she decided to become a doctor. She admits to being motivated by the power and the lure of an unattainable goal. She says, “I was tired of all too frequently being in a position where I thought I knew what a patient needed and having to play a game to get it.”

Claudette is hardly one for games. She remembers being criticized in high school because she became too emotional when discussing the Vietnam War.  She recollects that her dad consoled her by saying, “I don’t trust anyone who could talk about that god-damned war and not be emotional.”

While still a very feeling person, she has learned that it does not help anyone to take on another’s emotions. She says, “I’m working to be more of a reflector. It’s the difference between velcro and teflon. I need to be more teflon, a kind, supportive teflon.”

She acknowledges  that trying to be less emotionally involved does not always work. “That will seem like it’s working. Then there are three or four tragic events. The fourth one will hit you. It’s a trigger for your own stuff. Then there’s weeping.”

Claudette certainly has her own stuff. She had a car crash where her vehicle collided with a moose. The crash left her in hospital for six months and recovering in a bed in her sister’s living room for another six.  She credits her vivid imagination for the fact that she was not surprised by what she experienced during her recovery. She had seen the look of shame, frustration and vulnerability in the eyes of patients before and had made a point of imagining what it would be like.

Claudette says that during her recovery, “the biggest factor was Ross. I’m a single parent and he needed to know I was okay. That was the biggest motivator.”

Her own memories of some of the poor treatment she received still recur when she receives medical attention.  She says, “It’s the invasion and the extreme vulnerability.  It has made me even more committed to the role of family doctor. I think my whole experience would not have happened if family doctors were still involved in hospitals. When you co-ordinate care, there is someone who’s still interested in the whole person.”

Claudette knows the focus belongs on the patient. “It’s such a privilege to be allowed into the most intimate moments of a person’s life. “  She describes the learning process she is engaged in: “I went from missionary saying I wasn’t a missionary but thinking I could save people. If you look at my behaviour, you see I thought I had the answers. I’ve learned.”

Claudette works two days a week at a youth detention facility for young men. She tries to collate the information spread across the many agencies these boys deal with and tries to advocate for the testing they need. She admits, “I had missionary hopes. They die hard.”

Claudette says that if she has an impact, “it would be very minimal. It would be the impact there in the room with them. My goal is to be respectful and kind.”

She adds, “You hear those stories about someone coming back years later and saying that you were the one that turned them around. So I suppose there is always that chance. There’s a risk to that as well. Then it becomes about you, not the kid.”

She loves her work because the people she works with are survivors. She says, “I think one of the things I’ve learned from working with First Nations Indigenous Peoples is a remarkable resilience.”

She says, “I must be hopeful or I wouldn’t keep plugging away at the work I do. It’s the right thing to do. In my work more than any other time I think I’ve been able to do the right thing. What is right is equity. Advocating for equity for people who are poor and marginalized is really important work.”

For now she struggles with the tension between what she is physically and emotionally able to do.  She says, “I am realizing that I am not the bottomless pit I once was. When I do work, I try to be very present in the work and give comfort where I can and support where Ican.”

For now the most important part of her work is as a mother. C’laudette knows that “as for doing the right thing, it’s the right thing to be with Ross. It is all Ross driven. I lie in wait.”

STILL DIGESTING

Claudette is as accomplished as they come. Even now while she struggles with scaling back her work, she is a delegate to the Canadian Medical Association and works on both local and provincial committees on Prescription Opiate Abuse. She also ‘locums’ around the country, filling in for doctors while they take time away. Still she worries if she is passionate enough to meet my criteria.

She is like so many women I love - ridiculously wise, absurdly skilled and terribly apologetic.  As a result, she has made an enormous contribution to others and pushed herself beyond all measures of exhaustion. If there is a way for us to acknowledge the Claudettes of the world, it is to raise daughters and sons who will continue the work by doing the right thing not only for others, but for themselves.

When those sons and daughters go out for dinner with impactful people they will not know they are talking to a woman because she starts with an apology. And they will be able see who a man really is without waiting for him to be sure that it is safe to let his guard down. I am learning about these trappings of power from the best men and women I know. And we are grappling with it in all parts of our lives.

The revolution is not just in the world, but in us. If we can see the need to care for others and the environment, then eventually we must see the need to care for ourselves. It is not that we must stop trying to do more, but that we must refuse to let that effort take away from what we are actually doing.

The final way to rid ourselves of the missionary zeal Claudette describes is not only to relinquish our concept of ourselves as having all the answers, but to truly accept ourselves as having questions too. We’ll know the work is done when every single one of us can value ourselves enough to get what we need both in the times and places where we are helping and in the times and places when we are being helped.

When we really get it right, they are the same time and place and we get a glimpse of what equity looks like. It lies in our ability to be tired and scared and strong and passionate all at once, and to be okay with it.