Rural doctors give new meaning to the term 'full-time'

Imagine greeting all your patients on a first-name basis, knowing who they're married to, how many brothers and sisters they have, and the name of their family dog.

That's the type of relationship rural doctors have with the people in the communities they work in. Now, Regina physician Paul Dhillon has compiled a variety of stories from rural doctors into a book The Surprising Lives of Small-Town Doctors.

While big-city doctors have the luxury of staying relatively anonymous, rural doctors usually get recognized shopping at the local grocery store or even filling up at the gas pumps. While this presents its own set of challenges, doctors in this book describe rural postings as an opportunity to build long-lasting and meaningful relationships with people in a community.

"This book shows people what it's like to be a young rural physician, and it's a huge jump, it's a huge amount of responsibility," Dhillon said. "The knowledge you get from medical school and training, that's when it all comes into practice."

While Dhillon is based in Regina, he practices medicine in remote communities in Saskatchewan. His own stories are included in the book, like the time he taped grain to the exterior of a patient's' window to recreate the view of a farm field when the patient looked out the window.

"He's an elderly farmer who had cancer and it spread over his entire body," Dhillon said. "He would talk to me about how he misses his fields and just the way the hospital was set up he was actually looking at trees [outside his window] not fields."

So one day on his way to the hospital, Dhillon stopped and ripped out a few handfuls of grain from a nearby field. He taped it outside his patient's window so he could wake up to the scene of a farm field.

These types of stories make people laugh, cry and even surprise readers, in a way that Dhillon said paints the medical profession in a new light.

"Physicians are scared at times, physicians are sad at times," Dhillon said. He said because doctors cannot share specific doctor-patient information, the stories tend to focus on the roller coaster of emotions doctors face when practicing rural medicine.

"It's a sense of adventure for these doctors providing care to the communities that really need it," said Dhillon. "All of a sudden you are the go-to person for life and death decisions."

The University of Regina Press will hold an official book launch at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon on May 19 at 7 p.m. CST.