Valley of Gold

Sunday, June 7, 2026

 

My first trip to Val-d'Or was more than two years in the making. Dr. Allison Kukhta and I had first talked about the possibility back then, but it never quite happened. A few months ago, the conversation reopened and now I was finally on my way.

 

The funny thing was that I wasn't worried about the travel. By now, I thought I had Air Creebec figured out. Arrive at the Air Creebec terminal. Check in. No security. No long lines. Board the plane. Simple.

 

I stepped out of my Uber at the terminal expecting exactly that. Almost on cue, an Air Creebec employee standing beside a company van looked at me and asked where I was headed.

 

"Mist..."

I caught myself.

"Val-d'Or."

 

He looked at me for a moment.

"That flight leaves from the main airport."

I stared back.

"What do you mean?"

"Come with me."

 

Before I could fully process what was happening, my suitcase was being loaded into the van. He picked up a radio.

"Une passagère...en retard pour le vol..."

A brief exchange followed. Then he turned back to me.

"Don't worry," he said. "I told them."

 

As we drove towards Trudeau Airport, a conversation carried on behind me.

"J'ai attendu presque une heure pour un taxi."

"Ah ouain?"

"Ben oui. C'était long."

 

I assumed they were talking about the airport. I was still too busy replaying the situation in my head and wondering how differently things might have unfolded if that employee hadn't happened to be standing outside when I arrived.

 

Twenty minutes before boarding, I arrived at the Air Creebec counter.

"I'm sorry," I told the agent. "I don’t know I was supposed to come here."

She smiled.

"That’s okay. Flight numbers that start with nine leave from Trudeau."

“Oh.”

 

I made my way through security and finally settled into a seat at the gate. Then, I turned around to see whether people had started lining up. Instead, I heard someone calling my name.

"Michelle! Michelle!"

It was Dr. Kyrie Yujing Wang.

 

We had met seventeen years earlier as students. Since then, Kyrie had become a pathologist, building her career in northern Québec—first in Rouyn-Noranda, then Amos, and now Val-d'Or. Along the way, she had also become a successful young adult fantasy indie author.

 

A few years ago, we had talked about me coming to visit. Between the cost of flights, the prospect of taking an overnight bus, and the challenge of finding somewhere to stay, it never happened. And now, somehow, we were boarding the same flight.

 

During the flight, Kyrie continued working on one of her manuscripts, a fantasy novel set in medieval England. A short time later, we arrived in Val-d'Or.

 

Waiting for me at the airport was Allison, a paediatric allergist who had originally come to Val-d'Or for what was supposed to be a two-month position. That was twenty-six years ago.

 

I thanked Allison for picking me up. After all, she didn't have to.

"Especially the first time," she said. "It can get confusing."

 

Meanwhile, Kyrie was waiting to hear back from her taxi driver. When she mentioned this, Allison nodded knowingly.

"If you find a good taxi driver, keep them."

 

There aren't many drivers in town, she explained, and depending on the time of day, the wait can be up to an hour. Suddenly, the conversation in the van back in Montréal made sense.

 

As we drove through town, Allison pointed things out along the way. The ski trails that become hiking and biking trails in the summer. The hospital. The clinic. The places that would soon become familiar.

She helped me pick up the keys to my accommodations and offered to stop for groceries.

"Just worry about breakfast," she said.

 

For the first time on one of these trips, I had brought no equipment and very little food with me. Everything I needed was already set up at the clinic. It felt as though everything was ready for the week.

 

 

Monday, June 8, 2026

 

I arrived at the hospital at 08h45. The outpatient clinic sits next to the hemodialysis unit. Walking into the waiting room, I was momentarily confused by a series of plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling. I thought they were bags of dialysis fluid before realizing they were leftover COVID-era barriers.

 

Allison had a meeting that morning, but before disappearing she took the time to introduce me to the secretaries, the nephrologist, the internist, the paediatrician and her elective resident, and the nurse who would be helping with skin testing. Everything was a blur.

 

"Take your time getting settled," she said. "Most importantly, have fun."

 

I sat down at my desk and started leafing through the consults for the day. Some of the referrals were ten years old. Ten years. I flipped through the pile again just to make sure I had read the dates correctly.

 

Then I tried to log into the computer. I couldn't even turn it on. Once that was sorted out, none of my accesses worked. By the time my first patient arrived, I was making repeated trips to Nancy's office.

 

"Ma porte est toujours ouverte," she told me.

 

By the time everything was working, my first patient had completed her skin testing. She was a nurse who had driven in from a neighbouring community. The consultation went smoothly until the very end, when I realized I had no idea how to order her investigations or write her prescription. I had to leave and ask.

 

"Il n'y a pas de questions stupides," Géraldine, the allergy nurse, told me.

 

One patient had been avoiding suspected foods since 2017. I suggested an oral food challenge while I was in town, but she couldn't make it work that week.

"Je peux faire ça à ma prochaine visite." I had no idea when that would be, but she seemed satisfied with the answer.

 

Slowly, things began to fall into place. Allison had deliberately left my schedule light for the first day, which turned out to be exactly what I needed.

 

At lunch, I sat down in the cafeteria with my hummus, pita chips, and salad and looked around. The hospital felt like a place from another era. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the hospitals I remembered from childhood.

 

The afternoon passed more smoothly. One patient was here for possible mastocytosis. Another had spent years trying to access allergy care. One woman told me that she had waited three years without success for a consultation, then travelled to Montréal in 2018 because she had a friend there and managed to see an allergist who has since retired. Since then, there had been no follow-up.

 

As I listened to their stories, the reality behind those ten-year-old consults started to sink in. The patients remained remarkably patient and grateful.

 

"Je suis tellement contente d'avoir enfin un médecin," one woman told me.

 

By the end of the day, I felt like I had barely figured things out. None of my notes were entered and I had accumulated a pile of paperwork that I wasn't entirely sure where it belonged. I was tired. Allison reassured me that even after twenty-six years in Val-d'Or, she still found working entirely in French tiring sometimes.

 

After work, I stopped by home before meeting Kyrie at the pathology lab. She introduced me to one of her colleagues and gave me a tour of the department. I told her that my experience with pathology was quite limited: visiting her lab when she was an R5 at the Glen, a half-day tour during medical school, and an autopsy in second year.

 

We walked through town towards Thai Express. Along the way, Kyrie pointed out strawberry plants and blueberry bushes near the airport that people would pick later in the summer. We talked about gardening, her books, and life in Val-d'Or.

 

After dinner, I remembered the cake. I had brought it with me, as I often do when I travel north. One large chocolate cake was destined for the Cree Patient Services team I would be meeting later in the week. The other, a vegan chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, had no destination. I had almost left it at home before deciding on a whim to bring it anyway. In the end, I gave it to Kyrie to share with the pathology lab.

 

 

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

That evening, Allison invited Kyrie and me over for dinner.

 

On the drive over, she picked up Kyrie. The two had never met before.

"We don't often meet pathologists," Allison joked.

"Usually surgeons," Kyrie replied.

 

The conversation quickly turned to life in regional medicine. Kyrie talked about the challenges she had faced during the pandemic, when many northern communities were closed to those living outside them. The two traded stories about colleagues, hospitals, and life in different parts of Abitibi.

 

Before arriving at the house, Allison pointed out the new Friendship Centre being built for Indigenous patients travelling to Val-d'Or for medical care. We talked about some of the healthcare infrastructure that had developed in the region over the years and some of the things that were still needed. 

 

Then we turned off towards what seemed like a cottage in the woods. Inside, I met Allison's family. 

 

Dinner was prepared by her husband Marc: black pepper tofu, cucumber salad, roasted red pepper soup finished with Boursin cheese, breaded fish with Wafu sauce, and jasmine rice cooked in a National rice cooker that had been in service for forty years. The tofu was excellent. I immediately recognized the cornstarch coating that gave it its distinctive crispiness. For dessert, we shared some of my chocolate cake and Marc served a lemon tart.  

 

 

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

One patient came in for assessment of a previous episode of anaphylaxis. The reaction was so far in the past that I couldn't find the documentation in the paper chart. As I continued asking questions, she seemed surprised that I was trying to reconstruct the event.

Five of my nine patients that day had waited more than 3,400 days between referral and consultation.

I showed her the numbers.

"Tabarouette!"

 

I saw another patient referred in 2016 for contact dermatitis. I knew what he needed: patch testing. The materials were sitting in the refrigerator in my office. The problem was that the procedure is usually performed by dermatology, and even in Montréal the wait can exceed a year. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him he needed another referral.

 

Before I could figure out what to do, Géraldine stepped in. "Ne t'inquiète pas. Le dermatologue va être ici la semaine prochaine."

Problem solved.

 

Another woman had severe atopic dermatitis. She had tried different biologics, experienced side effects, been lost to follow-up, and lived more than an hour away. Listening to her story, it was hard not to appreciate how much persistence specialist care sometimes requires. We did our best to help move things forward.

 

As the morning wrapped up, I stopped by Allison's office to quickly run through anything that was pending. She was flying back to Montéal that evening, but before leaving she showed me how to dilute venoms for skin testing for my afternoon patient. We talked about resource management and the practical realities of maintaining specialized services in a regional centre. Before Allison arrived in Val-d'Or, Dr. Christine Lejtenyi used to fly in regularly and even brought her own venom kit.

 

In the early afternoon, I visited Cree Patient Services. The moment I walked in, the atmosphere felt familiar, and everyone could speak English.

 

Lydia welcomed me warmly and began explaining what Cree Patient Services does. They coordinate appointments, transportation, hotels, meals, support for healthcare professionals stationed in the communities, follow-up questions after specialist visits, and communication between communities, hospitals, and physicians.

As she spoke, I found myself realizing how much work happens behind the scenes before a patient ever arrives in front of a specialist. There were liaison nurses responsible for different communities, each carrying an impressive amount of local knowledge. I met staff connected to Wapmagoostui, Waskaganish, and several other communities that I would soon be visiting myself.

 

Friday, June 12, 2026

That morning, I was working with a new nurse. She introduced herself in English and explained that she wanted to practise. I immediately launched in. 

"Attends, attends," she interrupted. "Tu parles beaucoup trop vite."

We both laughed and switched back to French.

She warned me that there would be a fire drill later that morning, followed by a scheduled power outage. We reviewed the schedule together and discussed how to adapt the skin testing. 

My first English-speaking patient of the week was a Cree woman. Before discussing her allergies, we spent some time talking about my previous visits north and the foods I had tried along the way. I mentioned that the moose I brought back from Mistissini was enough for two separate meals: a Chinese-style stew with a hoisin sauce base, bean curd sticks, daikon, and shiitake mushrooms, and a red wine stew with carrots, onions, celery, tomatoes, mushrooms, and herbs.

 

At 10h30, the code rouge was called. Patients, nurses, physicians, and staff all filed calmly into the hallway while the pompiers completed the exercise. Afterwards, everyone returned to clinic and carried on as though nothing had happened.

 

The internet was slow. The power outage came and went. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by any of it.

 

Around lunchtime, I sat down with a bag of veggie straws and continued working through the growing pile of paperwork. Earlier in the week, the administrative tasks had felt overwhelming. By Friday, they still felt inefficient, but at least I knew what needed to be done.

 

Kyrie sent me a message. Her microscope, apparently, was not considered important enough to receive backup power. A little later, Allison sent me a message from Montréal asking how things were going and whether I was surviving the paperwork.

 

Eventually, everything was finished. The notes were completed, saved in the system, printed, and signed. Consultation requests were written, remaining labs were ordered, prescriptions were signed, follow up plans made and the patient charts were returned to the secretaries for archiving.

 

I packed up my things, returned my identification badge and keys, and waited for the taxi to take me to the airport.