Waskaganish

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Chisasibi → Wemindji → Waskaganish

I had spent the previous week in Chisasibi with Dr Christian Pineau, a rheumatologist, and Dr Meng Zhu Shi, now an allergy R4 at Université de Montréal. It was my fourth time there, and by now, things had a familiar rhythm. Our clinics were quite busy, and Chris and I also gave lunchtime talks to the local family physicians on our respective topics.

Meng and I spent a couple of evenings exploring, walking along the beach one night and driving out to the bay at sunset on another. On Saturday, Kathy, our nurse, lent us her car and Meng and I drove out to the Robert-Bourassa dam, or LG-2, near Radisson. Along the way, we stopped to pick wild raspberries and Labrador tea. Afterwards, Chris and Meng flew home.

On Sunday morning, I went for one last walk and found a patch of forest full of wild blueberries, which I ate as I went.

At the airport, I was deeply focused on my laptop, when suddenly I heard, “Hello!” I looked up and there was Michael.

Dr Michael Aw, now an allergy R4 at McGill, was joining me for the week in Waskaganish. I had only realized partway through the previous week that we would meet in Chisasibi and take the final flight together. For Michael, Waskaganish would be his fourth stop since leaving Montréal.

After we landed, everyone quickly disappeared until Michael and I were standing in an almost empty airport. Now what? All I knew was that Michael was supposed to be at a hotel and I was at a transit.

After a few unsuccessful Teams calls, hardly surprising on a Sunday, I messaged Kathy, who told me to call Valérie Élément. Valérie told me not to worry. Sure enough, someone soon appeared with two sets of keys. One had my name and an address on it. The other said “Christian Pineau.”

Michael had the name of a hotel written on his itinerary, but somewhat confused, we decided to follow the keys and the driver. I arrived at my transit and went upstairs, where my new roommate and I startled each other.

“I didn't know someone was staying with me!”

Neither did I.

Then she showed me my bedroom. The window was broken and apparently had been for more than a week. I called Valérie again.

“I might lose reception, je suis à la campagne,” she told me. “Give me half an hour.”

“Valérie, tu es toujours en garde? I can't believe you're helping me with this now!”

I sat at the transit with my cooler while Valérie made calls. Before long, Michael appeared with Lorenzo, a nurse he had just met at his transit, who had offered to drive over and help us. Michael suggested we try the hotel on his itinerary and see if I could take his room. Valérie was also waiting to hear back, so I joked that we would race each other.

Lorenzo drove us to the hotel, where I was able to check into Michael's room and opened the curtains to a beautiful view over the water.

Once everything was sorted out, Michael and I explored the Charlie Boy trail, where we were bitten alive by mosquitoes. We eventually headed back to cook dinner: roasted sweet potato, BBQ tofu, maple-glazed carrots and portobellos pan fried in plenty of Kerrygold butter.

 

Monday, August 17, 2026

The next morning, Michael arrived at the clinic, which Lorenzo had shown him earlier. I didn't have the address, and since it was a new building, it wasn't on Google Maps. Michael messaged me directions to what turned out to be a 25-minute walk from the hotel.

Our first patient had already arrived while we were still figuring out the setup. Then our second patient needed skin testing, and Michael went downstairs to find the supplies he had dropped off the night before. We didn't have fobs, Michael was still sorting out his IT access, and some of the medications we needed for testing weren't there. The pharmacy was still at the old clinic, so Diane Watson, our nurse for the week, offered to drive over and get them.

We still needed something to hold my allergy testing reagents. I had lost the original holder on one of my northern trips, so the week before, Meng had improvised by taping the reagents onto a steel instrument tray. A replacement costs $125 and is rather clunky to travel with anyway.

Diane disappeared and came back with a small rack normally used to hold blood tubes, then stabilized the bottom with a piece of cardboard. It worked even better.

“Frugal innovation,” I said.

Fortunately, a few no-shows gave us some breathing room, and by lunchtime we had created a functioning allergy clinic.

Diane started brainstorming ways to bring in more patients. Stéphanie, the school nurse told us there were quite a few children with allergies. She offered to put out an announcement, and we figured we could add another six children a day and extend our hours to accommodate them.

Earlier, I had given Diane one mission: organise a fishing trip. She pulled out a piece of paper and started adding other ideas for the week: the smokehouse, cultural centre, trails, rapids, people who might have fish, and finally Harrison, who could take us fishing.

Then she asked if we were free that evening. The conditions on the water were good, so if we wanted to go, that was the day.

“When?”

“Five-thirty.”

Diane drove us back to change, and at 5:30 we met Harrison.

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There had been a fishing derby the day before, which Michael had noticed, followed by a community fish fry that neither of us knew about. There were still other boats out, and we spent the next few hours fishing as Harrison told us about Waskaganish: the rapids, hunting and fishing, and different activities throughout the year. He kept asking if we had been to various places, and we kept explaining that we had only arrived the day before. Apparently, there was even a three-hour trip out to see bears.

At some point I sat down to snack on crackers, leftover tofu and carrots, and preserved mandarin peel while Michael and Harrison continued casting. Harrison even offered us some moose meat to take home.

After a very modest catch, we headed back to shore.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Before clinic, I sat down with Diane to discuss the game plan for the day. The first thing she did, however, was show me a Facebook post. We could go to the Gathering Place that evening and learn some Cree. Then Julien dropped by to tell us he was going blueberry picking at 7pm.

Stéphanie also dropped in. She had spread the word about our clinic but, after checking the waitlist, realized some children were already waiting for paediatric allergy by telemedicine. We called Valérie on Teams to figure out a fair way to add patients.

During one of my appointments, Valentina, the interpreter, mentioned that she had to go home to get some fish Suzanne the secretary was bringing in. Somehow my request for some fish to take home had turned into Valentina cooking it for everyone.

Wait, what?

Diane also mentioned that someone might have goose, and my immediate instinct was to offer to pay. Valentina explained that her grandfather had taught her never to sell the food they hunted. If they had country food, they shared it with the community.

“But I'm not part of the community,” I said. “I'm some random specialist who's been here for two days, and I don't even know when I'm coming back!”

That wasn't the point. Valentina told me that the next time I was in Val-d'Or, she could get some goose for me. It would already be plucked and cleaned. I would just have to figure out how to cook it. My mind immediately turned to possibilities. Could I make Peking goose? 芋頭炆鵝, or Cantonese-style braised goose with taro? Perhaps have that instead of turkey for Thanksgiving?

I still felt a little strange accepting all this food, so I joked that we could give away our vegetables in return. We had too many anyway, and at this rate we were going to need the cooler space.

At lunch, Michael and I went through some of our cases over smoked Applewood cheese I had brought back from the UK and Vinta biscuits. Meanwhile, patients kept coming. A dietitian sent someone, other people asked if we could see their family members, and somehow the clinic that had seemed rather light the day before was filling up.

At the end of the day, Harrison arrived with our catch from the night before, now filleted and frozen. He also brought an enormous frozen block of moose.

Photo credit: Michael Aw

That evening, we were cooking seared tofu and napa cabbage with chillies and soy sauce when Michael's phone went off. It was Diane. Julien and his colleague were ready to go blueberry picking soon. We finished dinner quickly and Michael headed out. I went back to the hotel, where the sky over the water had turned into a spectacular sunset.

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Clinic was starting to get busy. We were doing food challenges, and I was trying to figure out how we could make oral immunotherapy and milk or egg ladders work after we left. Even in the south, these require careful patient selection, family commitment and appropriate clinical support. Figuring out how to continue them safely when I was hundreds of kilometres away was another challenge. I spent part of the day talking with nurses and physicians about the logistics and had a meeting to bounce around some ideas about telemedicine.

After lunch, I shared a vegan chocolate cake I had made with the Specialized Services team. We also went downstairs to see if we could give the same allergy talk I had presented in Chisasibi the week before. The chief of medicine found us a room and a lunchtime slot for the next day.

That afternoon, Valentina tracked down something for us to take home: handmade tamarack goose decoys. Traditionally they were used for hunting, although these ones were made as decorations. The maker showed us how the wood was twisted and bent into shape, and one of the geese had just been made. They had this wonderful sapin-like smell. He explained that if the scent fades, you can soak them in water to make it come back. He was about to travel south to sell them in Old Montréal.

There was a community two-kilometre walk and three-kilometre run that evening, followed by a baseball game between the Cree Health Board and the Waskaganish band. We didn't leave clinic until around 6:30pm, so by then we had missed the organized walk. Michael and I decided to do our own on the Alice Trail just behind the clinic.

Along the way, we ran into two healthcare workers and walked with them for a while. One had moved to Waskaganish recently and told us how much she enjoyed living there because there were always activities going on.

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About 2.5 kilometres in, we found a huge patch of blueberries. There were so many that you could practically scrape them off the branches. We eventually picked a bagful while being bitten by mosquitoes the entire time.

On the way back, we stopped at the baseball game and joined everyone else to watch and chat for a while. The Waskaganish band beat the Cree Health Board 8-0.

Afterwards, we went back to Michael's transit for dinner, by then well past 9:30pm. Michael pan-fried the walleye we had caught on Monday with butter and herbs, and we had it with shiitake and button mushrooms cooked with Sichuan pepper, corn on the cob and some of the vegetables we still had left.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was exhausted.

 

Thursday, August 20, 2026

I barely had time to say hello to Diane before jumping into the first patient, and from there it was one after another. Diane and Valentina had been working hard behind the scenes, sorting out paperwork and referrals and even staying after hours to add patients to our schedule.

Rio, one of the laboratory technologists, came by to say hello. Diane had already told me she seemed to do everything. Rio showed me exactly which blood-tube rack we had been using for my allergy reagents. It was only about $30, so Diane suggested we order some for future trips.

At lunchtime, we gave our allergy talk to the local physicians, along with a second vegan cake I had made, this time orange pumpkin spice with a turmeric, nutmeg, clove and ginger frosting. We discussed oral and subcutaneous immunotherapy and whether we could eventually offer it locally. That opened up a bigger discussion about what would be needed to make it work and how to balance it against all the other health needs in the community. I was invited to join an upcoming pharmacological committee meeting so we could keep exploring these ideas.

Patients and families also asked why there seemed to be so many allergies in the community. I didn't have an easy answer, but it was an important question to explore together.

By the afternoon, I had lost track of our clinic list. We were doing food allergy assessments, skin tests and food challenges one after another. By the end of the day, we had fit in 13 additional patients.

Stéphanie came by. “Are you happy yet?”

“Thanks to your good work, I'm so busy I'm delirious.”

Someone told us about a seafood boil at Smokey Hill that afternoon, but we missed it. By this point, the problem was no longer finding things to do in Waskaganish. It was finding time to do them.

Diane and the team had even planned a surprise meal for us. They had brought walleye to cook with potatoes, but hadn't realized we were giving our talk over lunch. Then clinic ran so late that dinner didn't work either. We tried to figure out whether we could take everyone out instead, but by then people had other plans and we still weren't finished.

Partway through writing notes, Michael suggested we make bannock with the wild blueberries we had picked the night before. We prepared the dough in the work kitchen and pan-fried it in more butter. It came out crispy on the outside and soft inside. The only thing missing was cooking it over a fire in the woods.

Friday, August 21, 2026

Waskaganish → Nemiscau → Montréal

The night before, Michael had seen Valentina's handwritten list.

“Hey Michelle, I think we have 11 patients coming tomorrow morning.”

“How are we going to get through that? We have new patients and challenges to do.”

They weren't even all on our official schedule yet. Valentina was probably the only person who knew exactly who was coming. She had been messaging people on her phone and keeping track of everyone on her handwritten list.

Our flight was leaving Friday at 1:45pm, and I seriously considered staying another day. But really, what difference would it make if I decided at 10pm now or 10am the next morning? I decided to see how clinic went and make the call by mid-morning.

I woke up early the next morning and packed anyway, then went for one last walk along the water before clinic. It was a beautiful clear morning, with blue sky, green grass still wet with dew and the water beside me. The trail passed replicas of older structures and the old Anglican church. The mosquitoes were already out.

I had arranged for a driver to take us to the clinic, but while I was waiting, at least two people stopped and offered me a ride.

“No thanks, it's okay. Someone's coming.”

We arrived at the clinic with all our coolers and suitcases. We had hoped to have breakfast with the team, but that clearly wasn't going to happen. I reheated the bannock from the night before and shared it instead.

Valentina told me not to worry about the schedule. It would all work out.

And somehow, it did. Everyone who came knew we were flying out that afternoon and was very understanding. For some patients, I arranged initial blood tests with plans to follow up by telemedicine once the results were back.

As the morning went on, I started hastily packing up the clinic while Michael finished his notes. I could get my own things packed, but I realized I was going to leave the rest of the room in a mess. I apologized to Diane.

“It's okay. I'll help.”

Then Marion told me the goose was here. I had forgotten to remind her, but she hadn't. It was from the spring hunt and was already cleaned, frozen and partly roasted. I was genuinely touched that she had remembered and brought it for me. I put it into the cooler alongside the walleye and moose.

Meanwhile, Valentina was in the work kitchen pan-frying walleye and making a salad for us, while Diane made mashed potatoes and corn. Then one of the pharmacists, who knew I was normally vegetarian, appeared with a tofu taco from a potluck. We had about ten minutes to eat before our driver came to take us to the airport.

Once we got there, something seemed off. Our boarding passes said the departure was now 2:30pm. I checked my email. Nothing.

Apparently everyone except us knew the flight had been delayed. At least it gave me time to finish the notes I hadn't managed to write during clinic.

Back at the Air Creebec terminal in Montréal, we divided up what we had brought back. Michael wanted the blueberries for pie and jam and, having run out of containers, started scooping them into his coffee mug. He couldn't stop talking about how amazing the week had been. Everyone had been so welcoming and had gone out of their way for us as newcomers.

Now the question was when we should come back.