WORLD-CLASS MEDICAL SUPPORT
Ottawa doctor having global impact
Ottawa’s Dr. Sarah Giles had plans to maximize the amount of time she spent in her pyjamas over the holiday season.
It’s her preferred way to decompress between assignments to remote northern communities and deployments with Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the Nobel Prize-winning medical humanitarian organization. She is recently returned from a fourmonth stint on board a search and rescue ship that plucked refugees from desperately overcrowded boats off the Libyan coast.
“I want to work with people in need,” says Giles. “I’m at my core a fan of the underdog, whether that’s people in remote First Nations communities in Canada, aboriginal communities in Australia or in conflict zones around the world.”
Giles, a family and emergency physician, considers it her job to help level the playing field in health care by bringing her skills to bear where they’re needed most.
In Canada, she has worked in underserved places such as Fort Simpson, Fort Smith and Inuvik. In late January, she will begin an assignment in Moose Factory, which serves the nearby First Nations communities of Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, both beset by health and social problems.
Giles has worked for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Myanmar, South Sudan, Pakistan and, most recently, on a Mediterranean rescue ship. Giles spent four months aboard the MV Aquarius, operated by MSF in partnership with SOS Méditerranée.
She treated people traumatized from arduous journeys that sometimes involved rape and kidnapping. (In Libya, armed gangs prey on migrants.) Many of the refugees, she said, were malnourished, dehydrated and suffering from scabies, respiratory illnesses or chemical burns.
The burns were the product of spilled gasoline that combined with seawater to form a corrosive mix in the boats. Those sitting at the bottom of a boat were usually most at risk of the burns, which could do terrible damage to feet, legs and genitals.
“The burns are sometimes so intense that people jump out of their rubber boat because they are desperate to stop the pain and burning,” she wrote in one of her blog posts from the deployment.
According to the United Nations, 3,740 people have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean this year. More than 325,000 migrants have reached Europe — usually Italy or Greece — in 2016.
The migrants have been displaced from their homes by armed conflicts, natural disasters and economic distress in countries such as Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia.
Giles said the worst day of her deployment was one in which nothing happened. The MV Aquarius went in search of a floundering rubber boat that a plane had spotted: People were already in the water, the crew was told, but the Aquarius was four hours away. By the time it arrived on scene, there was no trace of the boat or its passengers.
“We looked and we looked and we looked,” Giles said. “It was the worst feeling in the world.”
Born and raised in Toronto, Giles said she was inspired to pursue a career in medicine after watching a 60 Minutes documentary about a black neurosurgeon helping people in inner city Baltimore. The doctor was Ben Carson, then director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and now a member of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. (Carson once called Obamacare the worst thing that has happened in the U.S. “since slavery.”)
“Yes,” Giles says wryly. “My life’s work has been inspired by a right-wing loon.”
Giles initially set her sights on becoming a neurologist, but that goal changed after she travelled to the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
She spent several summers working in the North as a student and was so shocked by the state of the region’s health care that she decided to dedicate her career to improving it.
“My vision of Canada includes everyone and it’s unacceptable for me that there are places where people simply can’t access health care. Even though these people are the sickest, they have some of the worst access.”
Giles said Canada’s First Nations are shortchanged not only on health care, but on housing, education and child protection services. “Canadians are under the mistaken delusion that aboriginal people are completely privileged and entitled when I see them living in old shipping containers.”
Giles lives with her twin sister, University of Ottawa professor Audrey Giles, between assignments and also lectures in the school’s medical faculty. Her work sometimes leaves her tired, sick and traumatized. In South Sudan, her hospital fell behind the front lines of the country’s civil war; she fled to Ethiopia seriously ill with, among other things, typhus, amoebic dysentery and C. difficile.
“What we go through is only a fraction of what our patients go through,” Giles insists. “When people say, ‘You’re a hero,’ I say, ‘No, you have to meet my patients.’ ”
She’s often angered by their plight.
“I despair for a world,” she wrote recently, “where the deaths of hundreds of people at sea each month no longer make headlines, and our response to fellow human beings is to close our eyes, push them back from our borders, and pretend that the problem does not exist.”
Sarah Giles plans to go on assignment for MSF again this year. “It’s who I am,” she says.
“I was saying the other day that if I died and the only thing my obituary said was that I did four assignments for MSF, I’d be proud.”