/Opinion: How my childhood lessons in Alberta can help defeat COVID-19 | Calgary Herald

Opinion: How my childhood lessons in Alberta can help defeat COVID-19 | Calgary Herald

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I’ve worked as a roughneck on a drilling rig in northern Alberta, among my life’s most formative experiences. Because of those opportunities, I travelled the world, paid my student loans and went to medical school. Because of incredible mentorship, I pursued research training and a master’s degree in public health at Harvard.

As I finished my training in Boston, I remember justifying my yearning to come home. Friends didn’t understand. Our prairies, foothills, mountains, giant skies, sunshine, badlands, rivers and streams. How can you describe our land’s beauty?

This past year has been awful. We are angry and frustrated at our loss of freedoms and current situation; despondent at our collective losses (now more than 2,100 Albertans dead and counting), our ongoing human suffering and economic pain; and embarrassed with our dubious title as North America’s worst COVID-19 hotspot. We feel beat up, noses bloodied and pride hurt. I know this feeling well — after every lost schoolyard fight, football game trouncing, or blunder or misstep in medicine. It feels terrible, but we must get over our pity party.

My high school football coach once taught me, when I was absorbed in self-loathing after a painful loss, to “Get up, Fabreau!”

This was one of my life’s most powerful lessons. I’ve encountered it many ways since. When I was bucked off a horse rounding cattle, I literally “got back on the horse.” When hurt by the death of a dear patient with COVID-19, I returned the next day and cared for those who remained.

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But there’s another lesson that my coach embedded. “You’re on a team, Fabreau. Play your damn position! We never win or lose alone.”

Things are not going well in Alberta. On our COVID-19 unit at the Peter Lougheed Centre, we’re seeing more, younger and sicker patients. Our ICUs have overflowed, and my co-workers are tired.

We health-care workers are worried about what’s coming. We’re frustrated that it didn’t have to be this way and weighed down by the suffering faces, families and deaths we’re witnessing. We’re saddened watching essential front-line workers from our low-income neighbourhoods, whose work helps us all, fall ill without paid sick leave and worry about how to feed their families. We’re tired, but we will always show up and do our best. We’ll fight hard to save every life we can because that’s our position on the team.

I’ve seen resentment building with those who don’t wear masks, believe in vaccines or comply with public health orders. We were frustrated to see packed patios and busy malls but saddened by our kids stuck at home, unable to go to school or play sports or activities they desperately need to learn, grow and flourish.

I acknowledge the public is frustrated too. They are tired of yo-yo open-close public health restrictions, curtailed personal freedoms and mounting economic pain, especially when some regions have not seen high COVID-19 rates. I empathize with these frustrations too; but, I’ve been on teams where disagreements became in-fighting and lost every game when this happened.

Dr. Gabriel Fabreau is an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the O’Brien Institute for Public Health and departments of medicine and community health sciences at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.