When Dr. Alec Cooper started having difficulty buttoning his shirt and using medical instruments last year, the Quebec City-based family physician never thought it would mark the beginning of the end of his career.
“My own family doctor assumed that it was just a pinched nerve in my neck,” said Cooper, 66, sitting on his couch in his family home.
“Finally my diagnosis came, which was a huge shock.”
In November, Cooper found out it was ALS, a fatal motor neuron disease.
“It means that I may not have that much more time to live … I think it’s a lot tougher on my wife, unfortunately,” said Cooper, holding back tears. “She’s preparing for a life alone.”
Cooper also worried about his 1,800 patients and how they would cope.
The anglophone doctor, originally from Victoria, had a full patient load and, before announcing his snap retirement, tried to figure out how he could help prevent his patients — many of them anglophones — from falling through the cracks of an overburdened public health-care system.
“I was just really panicking,” said Cooper.
“I was terribly torn. I have very close relationships with a lot of patients and that makes me sad.… All the doctors are stretched.”
2 doctors retiring months apart
Marilyn Dolan, a former patient of Cooper, says she was “flabbergasted” by the news.
“[I] kind of couldn’t believe it,” said Dolan. “What do you do if you get seriously ill and you don’t have a family doctor assigned to you? Like, I don’t even know what that road looks like but from where I sit, it doesn’t look very rosy at all.”
She says having a doctor who spoke to her in English and went the extra mile was “worth its weight in gold.”
Cooper’s retirement comes just months before that of Dr. Mary Delafield.
An anglophone from Montreal, Delafield has practised family medicine since 1992 in Quebec City. She says she’s been notifying patients over the past year and plans to fully step back in five months.
“Family practice is getting harder and harder and we seem to be often blamed by the powers that be for many of the woes of the medical system and it starts to feel burdensome,” said Delafield.
She says that as far as she knows, there are no other anglophone family doctors in the city, an assertion shared by Cooper.
“If there are, they’re probably in the same situation as I have been for the last little while.”
She says she has been working at capacity and was unable to take on new…
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