TORONTO - Before palliative care was even coined, Dr. Mary Vachon realized it was an important issue.

Now working as a consultant and psychotherapist in private practice, a professor at the University of Toronto and a clinical consultant at Wellspring — a network of centres providing cancer support, education and coping skills — the desire to help the dying and their loved ones surfaced while she was working as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1960s.

“I was interested in issues around unresolved grief because of a critical incident that happened (while in Boston),” Vachon said.

It came to a head after moving to Toronto, where she and her husband became friends with a couple that had four children. One day, she didn’t see the wife at their Newman Centre parish. The following week was the same.

“I said to my husband I think we better get close to these people, I think they’re in trouble,” Vachon said.

Sure enough, the woman was suffering from melanoma

Working at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry at the time, she asked a psychiatrist how she could be helpful to a young woman who was going to die and leave behind four young children.

“He said, ‘I don’t know, but if you’re interested in that sort of thing why don’t you go over to Princess Margaret (Hospital) because they’re looking for someone to work with nurses around their feelings about dying patients.’ So I went and that started my career in Canada.”

Vachon not only sees people who are in palliative care, but she also serves people throughout the course of illness and bereavement. In a workshop given to nurses last year, Vachon explained that she now sees palliative care and good care in general as care of the whole person — the one receiving the care and of the caregiver too. She believes a palliative care worker needs to tend properly to themselves spiritually, physically and emotionally to do the same for the patient.

“When I went through a serious cancer myself several years ago I began to have unusual experiences which led me to become increasingly more spiritual in the work that I do with people,” she said. “So I find that it’s very rewarding work being with people at this point and trying to help people make meaning in these very difficult kinds of situations.”

While a most important focus is to alleviate the physical symptoms of a person in palliative care, it’s important to talk about the concept of total pain and total suffering, she said, where suffering might be spiritual, psychological and emotional.

Carolyn Girard, The Catholic Register Carolyn Girard is a reporter and youth editor for The Catholic Register. A graduate of Carleton University's Bachelor of Journalism program, she has written and broadcast for several different news outlets locally and internationally including  The Ottawa Citizen, The Standard-Freeholder, various Catholic newspapers and most recently the Molokai Times and KMKK Radio in Hawaii.

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