TILBURY – After more than half a century of providing care, including still doing home visits for palliative care patients, Dr. Colin Bryan is retiring as family physician on Thursday.
TILBURY – After more than half a century of providing care, including still making home visits for palliative care patients, Dr. Colin Bryan is retiring as a family doctor on Thursday.
“People have put their trust in me and … I’m very privileged to have had this role in life,” said Bryan, who opened a family practice in Tilbury in 1977. “It is a privilege to look after people, especially in their hours of needs, like births and deaths and sickness.”
Bryan, who turns 82 next month, said he believes family practice is the “essence of medicine.”
“Being a family doctor … you’re that link with the people,” he said.
Even when telling a patient they have a serious medical situation, such as cancer, Bryan said “you can bring it to a human level – how that’s going to affect you rather than all the statistics people come out with.”
When it comes to caring for patients at the end of their life, Bryan has gone the extra mile to provide community palliative care and was still making home visits as recently as a week ago.
“I feel in palliative care or even any home directed medicine, you get a special bond with the patient,” he said. “You see how people live.”
It can be an eye-opener going into people’s homes, Bryan added, but it can help in how you comfort a palliative patient.
“You see them in a different light and a different perspective,” he said.
Bryan said he couldn’t provide this level of care if it wasn’t for his “wonderful wife” Becky.
Noting palliative care in the home often requires being away for several hours, often at night, he said Becky had “never, ever, ever complained.”
“She is one of the most generous people I know,” Bryan said.
He said she’s been generous with his patients, noting it was not uncommon for them to complete five or six house calls on a weekend together.
“I can tell you stories of going to do a house call and ending up being invited to supper, watching a ball game on the television with some patient … sort of living in their world for a while,” Bryan said. “I couldn’t have done that without the support of my wife.”
Another special woman in his life was the inspiration for Bryan pursuing a career in medicine.
He remembered being eight or nine when his mother became very ill and nearly died. While she fortunately went on to live into her 90s, his mother’s ordeal was pivotal in his ambition to become a doctor.
“It just seemed a very purposeful life,” Bryan said.
He spent two years as a resident and four years in family practice in England before immigrating to Canada in 1973 to work in Oshawa, before moving to Tilbury in 1977.
Bryan said he decided to come to Canada after feeling the National Health Service in England was becoming, from a family practitioner’s point of view, more of a referral service.
He read about the health-care system in Canada, where family doctors could also have positions in the hospital, could follow and treat their patients in hospital, and could do emergency work.
“It was just a bit more exciting, a bit more of what we’re trained to do as residents.”
One of the driving forces behind the creation of the Tilbury Family District Health Team in 2006 – the first of its kind in Chatham-Kent – Bryan said he is “pretty proud of this place.”
He said the first facility was located in a roughly 93-square-metre space with seven people. He added the center has since grown to more than 1,200 square meters and a staff of 50, including two pharmacists, dieticians and social workers.
“It’s made life easier,” said Bryan, adding the team supports each other.
As for actually retiring, “It’s bloody difficult,” Bryan said with a laugh, but he’s comfortable knowing he found a replacement in Dr. Sameh Gaid, who is taking on his roster of 2,000 patients.
Bryan said he would have been very difficult to live in Tilbury and not continue to work if he didn’t have someone replacing him.
“Dr. Gaid is very competent, and I believe he’s going to fit in very well,” Bryan said.
Coming from a family health team system in Saskatchewan, Dr. Gaid said he appreciates the “more comprehensive approach with work and the patients.”
“It’s a very nice group here. Everyone is helpful. Everyone is welcoming. …Patients are friendly. Everything is good for me,” he said.
Randy Coote, who has been a patient of Dr. Bryan since 1982, said he likes the fact Bryan says, “It’s your body, you know how you feel and what’s going on, you tell me and we’ll go from there.”
He added Bryan has a great sense of humour.
“It got to a point where I had to write down what I was going to see him for, because we’d end up gabbing and tell jokes,” Coote said.
Meeting Bryan, it doesn’t take long to realize he is a people person. Bryan has enjoyed his career in family medicine, which has included using humor to relate to his patients.
“I try to make people feel at home in an area where they’re confused,” he said. “Medicine is a mystery to 90 percent of the people.
“My goal is I want people to feel better when they leave here than when they come in.”