This past May, the Department of Medicine’s Culture & Inclusion portfolio hosted its fifth annual Story Slam. These events celebrate storytelling by allowing participants to share brief stories with an audience. This year’s theme was “Filling Buckets.”
Below is the transcript for the story neurologist and assistant professor, Dr. Manav Vyas, shared at the event, entitled Retelling a His-tory:
Buried in the many emails, I saw one from Kelsy. It read, ‘Remember the young man you saw at your last visit? He's moving to Toronto. He's going for college.’ Kelsy is a social worker with the Mercury Disability Board (MDB) and we've known each other for three years now. The e-mail and other such instances are what fills my buckets. To be attached to a person’s journey through their turmoil and see them succeed is an underappreciated aspect of medicine that keeps many of us going.
The email brought back memories of my encounter with him. He came to see me at the Kenora clinic. I greeted him and offered him something to eat or drink. At these clinics, we tried to ensure that the clients felt that they were not coming for a medical appointment. It was a conscious effort to detach these clinics from the healthcare institutions that served Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern Ontario. The trust in these institutions has slowly eroded over the years. Even the MDB clinics faced similar eroding trust, and after the recent commission report, under a new direction, considerable changes were made on how we interacted with the clients. In the end, all they wanted from us was to be heard and potentially get remunerated for what they have been through.
He got some snacks and we went inside the room. As part of the assessment for mercury-related compensation, he had already met a nurse practitioner and had undergone a detailed history and physical exam. My job was simple: I had to perform a neurological exam using a previously developed scale. The goal was to assess the extent to which mercury exposure may be causing his neurological symptoms. He had low-amplitude, mid-frequency postural tremors in both hands, not present at rest and not during the movements. There was no ataxia and no sensory loss. The remaining exam was normal. He scored low on the scale.
As I often did, I asked him to tell me a bit more about his life and how he felt the mercury poisoning may have affected it. He said that he did not think that mercury was affecting him, not directly anyways. Instead, he offered a very different perspective.
While many Indigenous people of Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations have suffered directly from the high levels of mercury in their staple food, the walleye fish, and their waters, from the Dryden Mill’s crimes of dumping mercury containing waste in the English-Wabigoon River, he told me that these communities have been grappling with another epidemic – the government’s decision to stop using the fish as food meant that over half of the community was suddenly unemployed. Their fish carried no value, and no one knew what to do. Many lost their “anchor” as they were no longer able to interact with the river in the same way as they did before. Amidst this identity crisis, people, like his parents, took up smoking, alcohol use and drug use: a generation was lost.
He was raised by his Nookomis (grandmother) who would shake a lot but was still with him, doing her chores and looking after him, his siblings and cousins, while her own children had either become homeless, left the Reserve, or in some cases, died from overdose. Growing up on the reserve, he had found solace in knowing that art and music can help heal. He went on to finish high school, moved to the town and was applying to pursue school in mixed media at one of the premier institutions in Toronto. I had encouraged him to apply and offered help reviewing his application. I saw his work and I was so happy to see how he had merged his personal experience and his passion.
I was very happy to hear that he had gotten in! If we look carefully, we can see this grit in our patients and caregivers on a daily basis. It gives me a unique perspective on human suffering and inspires me to do more.
His words towards the end of our encounter came to my mind. He said, “Mercury may have directly ruined many lives, but what many people don’t know is that it also caused a tsunami of social problems in our society. We may never fully recover from it; I want to break free from it and retell the story of my people.” I look forward to his-tory!
