A coffee with… Dr François Marquis | Dr Marquis prefers tea

I have rarely met someone who has so many different interests. The famous D^r François Marquis, head of the intensive care unit at Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital, well known to avid viewers of the show On call 24/7, gladly accepted my invitation for coffee, but wanted to drink tea. And not just a tea, but to offer a tasting of three rare varieties, Japanese and Chinese, infused according to the rules of the art.

Chantal Guy
Press

I shouldn’t be surprised after seeing him tell France Beaudoin about his medieval marriage, for which he and his wife made themselves a chainmail. They also make their deli meats, cheese and yogurt, among other many activities for couples. ” Our secret ? We have no children, ”says François Marquis, to explain how they manage to juggle a lot of hobbyists despite a crazy schedule.

This man is very serious, even maniac, in his passions, but that’s kind of how we want our emergency doctor when we arrive in an ambulance, isn’t it?

We start with a Chinese white tea, Jingning Yin Zhen. He explains to me in detail its origin, its peculiarities, its infusion, but the real specialist, he says, is his wife, who finds that he infuses it too much. We are at his Mirabel distillery where, with his partners, he is developing a new whiskey (another of his projects). “We are passionate about Japan, my wife and I,” he says. We have been there five times and we really taste the unattainable teas here. ”

Half of his basement is occupied by his wife for her tea ceremonies, while he occupies the other half with his workshop where he tweaks techno stuff. This basement and his distillery are the two great refuges of his life, when he leaves Maisonneuve-Rosemont.

It’s not over until it’s over

We are November 5, it’s a sunny day, the sanitary measures seem to be working well, I take this opportunity to ask him where he thinks we are with the pandemic. “In a funny place, really,” he replies. In some respects, we are in a more comfortable place than I would have thought. I am very happy that the number of cases is not skyrocketing and that intensive care is not more strained than it is now. Very happy that we can consider the reconstruction phase of the health system. Where I’m less comfortable is with what’s going on in Europe, and the fact that people really feel like it’s over. ”

The D^r Marquis worries that we forget the effectiveness of barrier gestures.

It is a bit so as not to forget certain details of this historical crisis that François Marquis publishes My pandemic notebooks, several texts of which come from the column he kept in the magazine Quebec Science. He dictated his texts to the editor-in-chief Marie Lambert-Chan, who transcribed them. It is therefore an almost entirely dictated book that tells us about the crisis from within, in the heart of the blaze. “I am aware that people have made very big sacrifices. Why ? This is a perfectly legitimate question, and this book is a little to tell them that it was not a joke. We didn’t do this for nothing. It is a global sacrifice. ”

The intensivist will never be able to forget any of the patients who died from COVID-19, nor how much his colleagues were to scoop up when there were several deaths in a single day. For them, these are not statistics. He also reminds all the people who died at home, for fear of going to the hospital, which will have to be counted one day. “In the first wave, we asked ourselves: ‘Where are our heart attacks, our strokes?’ There are every month, we weren’t seeing any more, and COVID does not protect against that, that I know of. ”

We move on to the second tea, Japanese, this time, tencha, whose taste he praises rich in chlorophyll, while I ask him if the paradox of this pandemic is that it is mediocre, that is to say not enough. spectacular. And if we are not a little ungrateful in the face of the efforts made. “Very ungrateful,” he says. We have been victims of our success, it is the first time in human history that we are able to attack a pandemic. We are not sitting with our fingers crossed waiting for things to pass. We are reinventing whole chapters of medicine, there has been global coordination. Our vaccine friends have done an amazing job. When people say the vaccine was botched because it arrived quickly, I say no, it’s all the other vaccines that take too long. It’s so incredible, what has been done, that people are rejecting it, saying to themselves that it cannot be. I learned a lot about the power of denial. ”

But he points out that a majority of people are vaccinated, which is a victory. He particularly salutes the young people who have collaborated, and cannot get over being nominated for a Mammoth Prize.

“It’s sad, but what a glimmer of hope to see that there are young people who have kept their thinking skills and who are good citizens,” he adds. I say it again: it is the most beautiful exercise in democracy of a generation. ”

Competition between hospitals

We move on to the third tea, also Japanese, a sencha this time, the Ohmi Sencha Saio, and I start to be on a rush of theine.

One thing that struck me in Dr Marquis’s book, because I do not know this environment, is the fierce competition between hospitals, while I imagined greater solidarity. “Competition is a nice word,” he said with a wry smile. It has always been there, it goes back to our grandparents. If it took so long to do the CHUM, it’s because Saint-Luc, Notre-Dame and Hôtel-Dieu were at open war. The history of medicine in Quebec is fascinating. Notre-Dame has always been the hospital of the rich, the Hôtel-Dieu, the political hospital [le cardinal Léger y avait une suite], and Saint-Luc was the people’s hospital, therefore the denigrated hospital. ”

Thus, due to the glaring shortage of personnel, employees are being torn apart and anything goes. “We have seen terrible things. The Heart Institute has never had COVID-19 patients, they managed to justify the government for not having any. Naturally, Maisonneuve-Rosemont had a blast with Sacré-Cœur and the Jewish. They had the nerve to run ads saying, “Are you sick of COVID? Come to us, we don’t have any! ” This is a rat! It’s like walking into an IGA to distribute Provigo flyers. It’s furious like that. ”

The D^r François Marquis believes deeply in a public health system. But this already fragile system has been ruined by the pandemic. It will be necessary to attract the next generation with something other than high salaries, he thinks, because working conditions are important for the young generation. He also believes that compulsory overtime is an abominable invention that amounts to psychosis. “I believe that big questions must be asked, as painful as the answers. What share do we want to give to its funding? How far ? What does universal care mean? Currently, it is all to the end for everyone. Which wasn’t so bad in the 1960s when it was thought of because even if we were doing our 110%, life would stop pretty quickly. Today, sky is the limit. We give fourth-line chemos to add two weeks to someone, and if we took that amount, we could make sure that all the children in a school could have breakfast. But there aren’t many people who think like that … ”

“Establishments have to sit down and look each other in the eye,” he continues. Our health care system has been put on a treadmill and there it shows us that it has angina. Before, we could go ostrich. Not anymore. ”

I think I’m going to have sleeplessness tonight, and I’m not sure if it will be because of the tea or the worry. But as long as there are Doctors Marquis, I will be reassured.