A work in progress
By Jennifer Parraga, BA'93
George Kitching says hearing patients’ stories can feel a little like being hit by a strong wind.
“You know when you step outside on a cold winter day and the wind hits you in the face, and all of sudden your eyes are streaming, your cheeks are red, and you have trouble breathing?” he asks. “That’s what it’s like for me.”
It’s just one of the many things that the second-year medical student has learned about himself in the past two years.
“I’m easily moved by patients’ stories of pain, suffering and also happiness and triumph,” Kitching said.
With a love of listening to people and hearing their stories, Kitching was drawn to medicine as a career. He sees the vocation as an opportunity to walk with people through their illness experience and to hopefully help them learn more about themselves.
After being accepted to Schulich Medicine, Kitching welcomed the opportunity to be based at the School’s Windsor Campus. Not only was it close to his home in Toronto, its smaller class size checked off a critical box for his ideal learning environment.
While only in his second year, Kitching is already enriching the culture at the Windsor Campus and, more broadly, the learning environment for Schulich Medicine students in both academic centres.
Kitching, along with his peers, developed an interprofessional health student network. The group was established after the Interprofessional Education Day in early 2018, and aptly called the Windsor Interprofessional Health Student Collaboration. Kitching led the group’s first event called the Art in Healthcare Symposium held in November.
The full-day event featured Lisa Boivin, a member of Deninu Kue First Nation in Northwest Territories, as the keynote speaker. An interdisciplinary artist and health care educator, Boivin is completing her PhD with an arts-based thesis focused on Indigenous perspectives of wellness and the disabling effects of colonialism.
Her lecture was complemented by a number of workshops including Bioart, Dance & Health, and Poetry in Medicine – to name just a few. Student attendees had the good fortune to learn from individuals in the arts and health care world including Louise Kinross from Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Jude Abu Zaineh, a Palestinian–Canadian artist, and Dr. Magbule Doko, a family physician in Windsor.
Kitching is proud of the Symposium and how it brought together a diverse group of health professional students to engage in shared learning through art and reflection.
It also represents a major part of his engagement with the community.
This extracurricular work, as well as his involvement with the Canadian Federation of Medical Students, is providing Kitching the opportunity to grow more comfortable with his role as an advocate.
“As students we must learn to identify issues in the systems around us and to develop and advocate for solutions to these problems. One day, sooner than we think, our patients will need us to advocate on their behalf. So we must develop good advocacy habits now that will continue to serve us for the rest of our lives,” Kitching said.
Becoming an advocate is a work in progress says Kitching, just like a muscle that needs to be flexed and built up. He continues to work on that aspect of his life, recently joining the Health and Environment Adaptive Response Taskforce of the CFMS with the goal of including the impacts of climate change on health into medical curriculum nationally.
He is also getting better at managing the strong wind that envelopes him when hears some of the more moving stories from patients.
