Dr. Khadija Bhimji is a palliative care physician who works in a community hospital conducting both inpatient and outpatient consultations. She provides symptom management, psychosocial/spiritual support to patients and their families, personally visits home-bound terminal cancer patients, and also cares for patients at hospice.
"I enjoy teaching, and always look forward to having resident doctors and medical students come and work with me to learn more about palliative care. It is always a pleasure to be asked to teach small or large groups, whether it be medical trainees or a group of doctors and nurses in practice as part of their continuing professional education.
I remember a 78-year-old woman I cared for in hospital, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was deteriorating quickly, and would not be with us much longer. Her 82-year-old husband was devastated. They had a long, at times turbulent, but overall very happy marriage. They had survived the depression and a world war together, but never had children. She was coming to terms with what the disease meant, but he wasn’t sure how he would manage without her. He had served during World War II, and seen many atrocities. He had lost a brother to the war, and watched many of his comrades lose the battle to their injuries. But ‘she was always the strong one’, he told me. One day, on my rounds, I saw him seated at the end of her bed while she was asleep. He was massaging her feet, and whispering endearments to her. Witnessing such an intimate moment touched me in a way medicine never has before.
The goal is to improve the quality of patients’ lives and reduce their suffering. The stories, the lived experiences of these people, their challenges and triumphs, and their love stories keep me wanting to come back to this work each day.
Going forward, I would like to make time to listen to more stories, to be present with families during their journey, to be more in touch with my own spirituality and theirs. As I get older, I realize how important it is not just to provide lip service to finding a work-life balance. This means more time caring for my body and nourishing my soul, but also recognizing and acknowledging my limitations without self-judgement.
If I could make one change to the health care system, it would be changing the way funding is allocated. The current siloed approach to funding is clearly not working. Instead, if there was regional “bundling” of funding for defined outcomes with clear leadership to coordinate this and to ensure it met the needs of the specific communities they served, I believe it would lead to a healthier population overall and better use of limited resources.”
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