Dr Olurin MD CCFP(EM)

A backward hop: as a girl, Dr Olubunmi Olurin attends the Federal Government Girl’s College in Akure, Nigeria. In her high school dormitory was an asthmatic girl. This asthma was poorly controlled; Olubunmi often accompanied the girl to the school clinic where a nurse administered salbutamol tablets. If the tablets didn’t help, the patient was transferred to a distant hospital.

Olubunmi sits up at night as the girl rasps and wheezes, the sound keeping the entire dormitory awake. But fear keeps the other students awake too: Olubunmi thinks the girl will die with the onset of each relentless attack because Olubunmi has seen the girl desperately out of breath many times before—and especially at night. The threat of the girl’s death is constant and Olubunmi thinks, while watching the nurse auscult her friend’s chest, that she will one day learn why her friend can’t breathe. Olubunmi feels that once she knows why, she will possess the information necessary to help her friend.

She attends university in Ibadan, Nigeria. She becomes a physician. She comes to Newfoundland with her husband and settles in Botwood.

A skip forward: several years into practice in Canada she is called to see an emergency patient in the clinic. A 68-year-old woman is short of breath. The woman has recently been admitted to a senior’s home, arriving from the West Coast to be nearer to her daughter. The woman has a long history of asthma and had neglected to use her fluticasone inhaler during the move to Botwood. This history is provided by the daughter, not the patient, because the patient can’t speak. The patient’s breathing is fast and shallow and Dr Olurin can’t auscult breath sounds in the chest.

Dr Olurin treats the patient with intravenous methylprednisolone and serial salbutamol nebulizers. Within a few hours the patient’s breathing returns to normal and she is seen happily talking with her relieved daughter. The patient is discharged back to the senior’s home with a prescription for inhaled steroids, a short course of oral steroids, and a rescue inhaler.

A sideways jump: after obtaining her medical degree in Nigeria and working for a few months as a doctor she becomes responsible for a patient with metastatic endometrial cancer. This patient develops low white blood cell and low red blood cell counts. Dr Olurin consults with a hematologist who mentored her in medical school. This hematologist is renowned for her extraordinary efforts in making patients comfortable at the end of their lives. The hematologist accepts the patient in transfer and then attempts therapies to ameliorate the patient’s condition; she knows the patient will die but tries what she can with the hope that a difference can be made. The patient dies a few weeks later.

A young woman wants to become a doctor to help people; she becomes a doctor and helps people because of her knowledge; she watches a senior doctor with greater knowledge meet the limits of what can be helped.

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