Musings & Meanderings

Just over a week ago, I received a letter from my GP that he is shutting down his practice. Add me to the list of millions of Canadians without basic medical care. I actually haven’t had that for a long time here, but that’s in the lap of cynical and burnt out doctors, which is another post altogether.

No, you can’t simply find another GP here. Their practices are all closed. Patients are told to contact the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College maintains a list that is always out of date by at least 6 months. Patients get the list, which has hundreds of physicians names on it, only to be told by every office they call that the practice has been closed for many months now. The College, by the way, advocates for their peers …the physicians and surgeons. No one advocates for the patients. Supposedly one can write to the Minister of Health.

As recently as 10 years ago, if you went to specialists, any one of them could direct you to a good GP. Today they all shake their heads and say, “Not any more”.

After receiving and trying to digest that news, I next faced this blog going into meltdown. It was shut down for several days, due supposedly to a server migration that made the mess worse. Some hosts should not be offering Linux on Apache combined with open source packages that they don’t know a great deal about.

The upshot is that I have a new host and re-installed yesterday. Some data, such as categories, didn’t survive the import, so it will take a few days to get through the archives.

If you get pinged from one of my old posts …again… please say that you forgive me!

Now I’ve also lost my voice, although I can whisper. The best thing I can say about this is thank goodness it went after I made my new hosting arrangements, and now I have a ‘voice’ again for musing and meandering on things that matter much to me.

WordPress …je t’adore. It is better the second time around.

BlueHost makes a big difference too. Installing and setting up the second time around has been so much easier I feel like I’ve moved to another planet. I even got everything validating within hours yesterday. I’m sure there’ll be new twists and quirks to deal with, especially as I add plugins, but the past month has also proven to be a great learning experience.

If you’re a returning reader, thank you for your faith.
If you’re in Toronto, do you happen to know a GP with good hearing?

She was born in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Her parents had lived through the Great War and the Revolution, and her father, a Russian Orthodox priest, had refused to renounce his God. So she attended a new school at least twice each year, never knowing when KGB attention would sharpen its focus on her little family and cause them to run in search of another place to live. In the end, the running was for naught, and by the time she was 12 her father was taken away for the last and final time. They were left with only a rumor, never formally confirmed, that her father had finally been executed. By the time war broke out again, she was fully indoctrinated, well trained in fear and suspicion and primal self-preservation.

After the war, she and her mother arrived as refugees in Canada. They worked as indentured servants for one year to pay for their passage, and they were incredibly fortunate. Their fortune was to be taken in together, instead of being separated, by a prominent gentleman and his wife. The gentleman was semi-retired, with duties only as a board member of a large and venerable publicly owned institution, and he mentored his younger ward, giving her the run of his personal library, and arranging for her employment at his firm’s head office in Montreal when her passage had been fully served.

“I remember this moment,” she tells me, “when everything changed. All my life I had lived with my heart clenched tight in total fear and paranoia, like a heavy rock in my chest. One day, as I stood on rue Sainte-Catherine waiting for the light to change, I became aware of everything around me in a different way. It was a perfect day, with blue skies and sunshine and a light breeze. Everyone on the street stood or moved so freely, so lightly. No one was afraid, or tense, or self-conscious. I stopped and stared, and the heavy clenching fear in my heart eased open and fell away.”

60 years later, she looks at me hopelessly and tells me, “It’s back.”, and then she tells me why.

In recent years, she, and her friends and family as well, have had cause to interact with our medical system, and related social services as well, repeatedly. There have been too many incidents where doctors and others engaged in providing medical care cited rules and procedures as their only communication to the patient. They filled out paperwork and routinely turned away anyone whose needs could not be clearly addressed by approved procedures. They offered narcotics and tests and specialist referrals that took months to materialize, were performed, and produced results that were ignored and not followed up on. She has further discovered that she no longer has access to effective representation by elected officials that can do anything to intervene on a citizen’s behalf.

For over 40 adult years, she worked hard, paid her taxes, always voted, and never hesitated to contact her political representatives when government services were delayed or inefficient. This process, she says, has stopped working. It seems to her now, that everyone she can expect to encounter through her old age works for the government, and acts more and more like the citizens of the communist country she grew up in, like chattel. This is why, she says, the fear is back. It is the fear of soulless automatons who thoughtlessly follow their master’s rules and do not see another human being when they look at her.

How much of this, I ask myself, is an echo of her past, and how much based on the current reality? Is there really much difference between advanced socialism and communism? There are some people who’ve received satisfactory medical care here in recent years. I’ve spoken to them. They were all highly successful, well known, and they were all men. I have not heard a happy patient story from an average citizen, or from a woman, in many years. The truly wealthy all leave the country for medical care.

How much does it take, I wonder, for those of us who haven’t been terrorized, to learn to be afraid?

—–

Trackback: Free Does Not Mean Avaliable.

…and on a Weekly Wrap Up (links).

Yesterday’s hours all got sucked into the time vacuum that one is presumed to live in when one has need of medical attention in Canada.

Getting to a doctor’s appointment is rather a big production in itself when you can’t stand or sit normally, and cannot walk more than a short distance or without aids. I had thought this all well planned out in advance, until being detoured, directly from the appointment and without my full participation, to a hospital. I finally escaped at about 10 pm last night, more handicapped than when I had arrived.

Oh, how I wish this story could be over.

I’ve thought, on a number of occasions, of doing a blog or three on the subject. One could be simply horrific experiences, another ‘duh’ experiences, and a third more probing and analytic. For now, I just enjoy sites such as Multiple Sclerosis Sucks.

There is, these days, a bit of publishing, both via the internet and more traditionally, of very poignant and literary scraps and stories illustrating the doctor’s point of view. If this interests you, try local author Vincent Lam’s award winning collection called Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. (I do hope this young man continues writing.).

More difficult to find is the well-written patient point of view, beyond individual experiences and general expostulations of complaint or frustration.

Having been, since 1980, a complex conditions patient and a caregiver for others in the same boat, and also a mom who was in charge of family triage, I know that the overwhelming majority of patients’ stories aren’t fully and coherently told. To a great extent, I believe that this is because dealing with serious medical problems drains so much of our resources that there typically isn’t enough left over for literary creations, activism, etc.

There is, though, a real need for better communication between the medical care providers and the recipients. Maybe we’ll get to that after we get to dealing with how to actually pay for half decent care.

Do please post, or email to me, any examples of robust patient/provider communication on the web that you’re aware of. Although my personal resource allocation doesn’t allow me to contemplate starting or running any large project in this area right now, I still can and do contribute when I can wherever others might benefit.

Today was not the first time I’ve had an MRI scan done. (The first was in 1992.) Last Thursday we were joking that my brain had broken the machine, following a 2+ hours session. Everything was working fine until they tried to do this one particular image of my brain. Each time we started the results would go out of whack. We’d stop and get me off the bed. Then the tech would turn off the machine, turn it back on, reset it, test it, and all would be fine until it started back up with my brain inside.

We finally got it today, and went on to do a number of other scans. For the first time, I experienced really strong sensations of heat, vibration, and sometimes pain (one location only) in the body part being scanned. Each time a scan series would stop, my entire body and heart would give a little jolt, like an electric shock but inside and throughout the tissue or structure of my body. Afterwards, I could barely walk or talk, and even hours later my motor control and reflexes such as swallowing are more impaired than usual.

MRI machines and the rooms they are in are always really cold. I think this is because the superconducting magnet is very cold, although insulated. Was the burning heat from the radio waves? or just in my body?

I sure wish that I had a doctor or tech to ask about this. I guess that most people would just want to be told not to worry, but if you know me, you know I always want to learn and understand.