At the age of 87, Gladys Sibley’s biggest regret in life, as she faces her final years, is that she isn’t spending this time with people who love her.
Her parents died when she was young and, in rural Nova Scotia, she raised her siblings like she was their mother.
Since then, she separated from her husband and became estranged from her children and extended family.
I started training to become a doctor in 2020 and met Gladys at the onset of the pandemic through a volunteer program connecting seniors in isolation with students. She allowed me to share her story. We met in person for the first time Sunday, Sept. 4. Before that I called her every week. And those calls changed the way I look at medicine and the way seniors like Gladys, living their final days without family to take care of them, are treated by the health care system.
Gladys says she’s no “negative Nelly” and she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to be anyone’s burden. But it doesn’t take much to see that the system isn’t serving a growing population of seniors. I fear the consequences of a generation of people feeling this way. When Gladys had what we consider a red flag symptom in medicine I encouraged her to seek hospital care. A red flag symptom is usually a sign of a serious condition. The patient should see a doctor or get tests right away. Gladys ended up staying in the hospital for several days and described the experience as de-humanizing, just laying there, waiting for health providers to come by, and no visitors to share the time with.
