Examining Room
within the walls of the opioid crisis
by Dr. Lorinda Spooner

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During 30 years in primary care and addiction medicine, the Vancouver-based Dr. Lorinda Spooner has found her examining room a place of suffering, of adversity, but also of hope. Yet, since 2016, when the opioid crisis was declared a public health emergency in British Columbia, more than 17,000 people have died from the toxic street supply of illicit fentanyl. Hope has been harder to find. So, Dr. Spooner began to write, “to try to find meaning out of all this suffering,” and to give readers insight into the lives of those battling the disease of addiction. The result is this poetry collection – both raw and cathartic – one that looks unflinchingly at the pain the opioid epidemic has caused, and still marvels at the strength and resilience of those caught in its grasp. Dr. Spooner writes, hauntingly, “I am not my sorrow. ” That, surely, is a declaration for us all.

www.examiningroom.ca

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Lorinda Spooner is a member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the American Board of Addiction Medicine.. She started her healthcare career as a nurse working on Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic. There, she carried out house calls by snow mobile and medivacs by Twin Otter airplanes. As a medical student she was blessed to meet Mother Teresa, while volunteering at one of the homes for the destitute and dying in the rough streets of Calcutta – a place that now has haunting echoes in the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. As a doctor, Lorinda specialized in rural family practice, which allowed her to work in under-serviced areas on the British Columbia coast – Bella Coola and Haida Gwaii –and to return to Baffin Island numerous times. She was drawn to the beauty of the land and to the elders who were so open and so eager to show their traditional way of life. For the past 15 years, Lorinda has focused on addiction medicine, and has witnessed the drastic, catastrophic rise of addiction and death in the context of the opioid crisis. Her work experience includes: lead physician at the Vancouver Drug Court, the Downtown Eastside Mobile Medical Unit, the Vancouver Jail, outpatient primary care and addiction clinics, the Vancouver General Hospital Complex Pain and Addiction Service, and most recently Corrections Health Care. Lorinda lives on Vancouver’s North Shore with her family, loving the ocean and local mountains.

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Contributors

Author

Dr. Lorinda Spooner

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