Most of us are aware that the discipline of Palliative Care,
with its focus on excellent pain management, other comfort measures, and
psychosocial and spiritual counseling, has made a dramatic difference in the
way patients are treated near or at the end of life. However, for most of us, knowledge of
Palliative Care is usually limited to how it functions in so-called “first
world” countries. What is Palliative
Care like in areas around the world that have less-effective systems of health
care delivery? Lucy Bruell’s documentary, Oli Otya: Life and Loss in Rural
Uganda, aims to tell this story.
Bruell, an award-winning documentarian (and coincidentally—and full
disclosure—the Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine
Database), follows a husband-and-wife team, an internist and a palliative care
specialist, who travel each year to Uganda to volunteer with a small palliative
care service based in a rural hospital. Along
with the team nurse, nursing assistant, and spiritual counselor, and a medical
student who has accompanied them for this trip, they see patients in the
hospital, the clinic, and most of the time, in the patients’ homes, often
covering many miles in a day in this rural area of the country. It is the stories of these patients that constitute the
heart of the film. A woman who has been
catastrophically burned in a revenge crime, a man with metastatic cancer who
can no longer walk, a woman with end-stage rheumatic heart disease who insists
on gifting the team with a live chicken for their work, a young man with a
progressive neurodegenerative disease whose mother ascribes his behavior to
demons—we meet these and other patients as the team makes its rounds, interacts
with villagers and herbalists, and fights to overcome shortages of critical
medicines.
