Canadian Health Care

Many people have a problem with the Canadian health care system, and I am one of them. It’s inefficient and inconsistent. Doctors are mostly apathetic professionals making rounds through the small, dingy rooms of public clinics. Success is measured by the number of people they manage to send home from their clinics – cured or not.

It’s obvious that this is important. The health care system is meant to care for our health, and if it doesn’t do that, we have a serious problem.

Shouldn’t health be the main priority of the health care system? Shouldn’t doctors want to make their patients well again, as soon as possible? Shouldn’t efficacy, not ease, be the criteria by which doctors evaluate treatment?

You might ask what right I have to be talking about this. Well, I’ve been in and out of waiting rooms and doctors’ offices and labs pretty often in the last few years. In April of 2011, I caught a virus. At first, it seemed like a run-of-the-mill thing. I was tired, and spent my entire Easter break in bed, thinking it would go away on its own. When it didn’t, I booked an appointment with my doctor. She sent me for a few standard blood tests, and then… I waited.

The policy with these tests is that the doctor’s office will only call if the tests come back positive. Mine didn’t, but I was still sick three weeks later, when the results were supposed to have come in, so I went back to her office. She confirmed that none of the tests had come back positively and sent me for a few more tests.

The cycle repeated itself, with all the test results coming in negatively, the doctor failing to contact me, and me revisiting her office every few weeks for the next two and a half months.

At this point, I was completely fed up with the system. I had been sick for two and a half months, and I hadn’t been diagnosed. My doctor was sending me for two or three blood tests at a time, and she didn’t seem to be concerned about how long my illness had lasted. I had been home from school for the entire duration of the sickness, barely able to do anything except for lie in bed. I was having brief hallucinations and my memory was faulty. I was scared, and she didn’t care.

That was went I walked into the office. When I walked out, I was infuriated. Since none of the tests thus far had come back positively, she told me, she thought it was a rare virus. She specifically told me that it must be “one that isn’t often tested for.” Then she sent me home.

I had no prescription. I had no blood test requisition sheet. All I had was my doctor’s feeble assurance that it would probably go away on its own in a little while: the health care system had given up on me. I was no longer a priority, and it didn’t matter that I was sick and scared and insecure.

I am not the only person who has been treated this way by Canadian medical professionals. The system is inherently problematic, and it fosters an environment of coldness and indifference. Ask someone who has experienced it firsthand – when patients are not truly cared for and health is no longer the first priority, can Canadians still boast about our health care system?

I say no.

The Gum Thief

      I was the kind of kid who read the Brothers Grimm at five. At six, I puzzled over the difference between crocodiles and alligators (and came to the conclusion that one was a brand name for the other). And at seven, when my friend told me to look out the window, I gave him a blank look and asked, “Window dot com?”
      In other words, from the very beginning, I loved to read and think, and was mostly not very good at either. I tried to be smart, and instead I just managed to sound like a fool. Once, when my dad was doing renovations and sawing some boards in the basement, I sat on the stairs and sighed, “My heart is breaking, for the master is making so much noise.” (More likely, my head was splitting, but in elementary school those details aren’t really important.)
      I liked to curl up in unobtrusive corners of the house and read and mutter witticisms to myself. I dreamed of what my life would have been like if I’d been born to royalty instead of lowly peasants, and thought I was a martyr for cleaning up my clothes when my mom told me she couldn’t see the floor of my bedroom.
      This is probably why I find young children with over-active imaginations and grandiose vocabularies so funny today. (The five-year-old who used the word “salutations” when greeting me is a really good example of this.)
      Also, not long ago (to get to the point of my story, at last...) I witnessed a mother confiscating her young daughter’s gum – and saw the daughter promptly run out of the room and into her own bedroom. I followed her, and saw the little girl open a drawer and pull out yet another piece of gum from a package in the bottom.
      I was pretty sure this gum was stolen from the same place as the first, confiscated piece (the mother’s purse), so I asked, “What do you have there?”
      The child spun around, her face red and guilty. But she recovered quickly, and, narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms, she told me: “You know what? I like you, but you are so nosy!”

Hello World!