To wit: This week I had to take Collette to the emergency dept at North York Gen. Monday she had so much pain she could barely work and it had gotten much worse by Tuesday. She had phoned her doctor, but it was too late to see her, so she suggested we go to the hospital.
When we got to the ER it was moderately busy. Lots of kids. Everyone running around with masks, fearing N1H1 lurking in the vending machines. A little disconcerting actually, all the nurses with the masks on, some even with goggles, like a scene from a B movie where some manufactured plague is about to turn us all into zombies ..
The triage nurse saw Collette pretty quickly and she was officially registered. That was a set up, really, perhaps the hospital's cruel way of toying with us. Because that speed was definitely a misnomer. To cut the story short (OK, I know, that's not like me, but I currently have a cold, and yeh, I should have worn the fucking mask) we sat there for 7 hours. Seven hours, in an ER that wasn't busy and barely had an ambulance come in.
Looking around and overhearing some of the other patients I did get kind of miffed that there were people there who perhaps didn't need to be in an ER. A very loud couple was sitting by us, reeking of booze and the guy's basic complaint sounded a lot like heartburn. Eventually they left, before being seen, after creating a bit of scene. They were inspired to do so by a mother who screamed and wailed because her child was not being attended to in a timely fashion. I don't blame her but it did open the floodgates of people going up to the nurse and yelling. That really didn't work. It only inspired one doctor to tell Security to keep the patients away from him.
Yeh, we wouldn't want that, would we. Doctors interacting with patients. Ewww.
Part of the problem is that after 11 pm, the ER loses one doctor. Yeh, a big hospital in one of the more densely populated areas of Toronto, gosh we won't have any patients after 11 ............ will we?
We all know that Ontario cut back medical services. The same gov't that allowed shop owners to steal millions of dollars of gov't sponsored lottery money and, as an alternative to brick and mortar medical funding, set up online services and the like, like E-health ... which basically turned out to be some kind of pork barrel swindle that wasted billions of dollars of tax payer money. Oh yeh, the same gov't that gave themselves a 23 thousand dollar raise, to improve our quality of service. And we sat our ass for 7 hours in an emerg, before anyone saw us.
When Collette finally saw the doctor, she was out in about 15 minutes with a diagnosis of a kidney infection and a prescription for antibiotics. So we were out there ... too bad the diagnosis was wrong. So not only do we wait for 7 hours, we don't even get the service we needed.
We ended back in the ER the next night. It was even less busy than the night before. Another 6 hrs before being seen by a doctor. At least this time he got the diagnosis right, Collette had a bowel infection. They kept her overnight and sent her home with better drugs. She's doing better now but had to take the week off work.
I'm pretty much pissed about all this. I'm sorry, but I find the quality of service we got verging on shitty. I know I'm not alone in that, and I know, I know, many many people have it way worse. Yet we put up with it. We whine and we bitch and we know its fucked up but we keep getting these inept immoral govts who seem designed to only serve themselves. Like, we'll give ourselves the biggest raise in the history of provincial gov'ts by you all will have to do with fewer doctors.
What?
A recent ombudsman report basically stated that our government's are slow, unresponsive, inept and disenfranchised from their voters and that this has been building for some time. And we built it folks, no doubt about that. We let them lie and bamboozle us and when they fuck up we let them get away with it.
We had to wait 7 hours to see a doctor, but if someone parks the wrong way on my street, they get a ticket in five minutes ...
Yup, we get the gov't we want.
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