Why I’m Voting On The Health Platform in the Ontario Provincial Election. #onpoli #voteon
I’ve lived in Ontario since 2006, and last night was the first time I’ve been forced to use my local emergency room.
I’m fine, and I had lots of time to think about who I was voting for while I was waiting for several health professionals to determine whether I had a blood clot or a strain in my leg over the last 48 hours.
A quick note for those of you that aren’t Canadian, healthcare is provincially operated and publicly funded. I live in Toronto, Ontario, which is the largest city in Canada, in the most populated province. My experiences do not reflect the system as a whole, which varies greatly between provinces.
My adventures in Ontario health care recently have been remarkably good. Lately, I’ve been regularly seeing a number of medical professionals with my fertility stuff, and I’ve never waited longer than an hour to see anyone, including my current OBGYN, who is available not by appointment, but by queued drop in time most weekdays. I’ve gotten blood test results back the same day, as long as I show up in the morning. It’s gone a long way in providing me with fairly immediate assurance that I’m not miscarrying on a regular basis, which has allowed me to continue on with my normal life in a way I’m not sure I would have been able to if I lived in rural Nova Scotia and didn’t have regular access to these services. I’ve also been able to have biweekly appointments around my work schedule since they open early, which has been huge.
I had a bit of a rough go last year mainly involving a private ultrasound clinic and a few missteps while my family doctor was away, but I learned my lesson there, and so did my doctor, who stopped referring people to that particular clinic.
Half of succeeding in the Ontario health care system is having a good guide. Matt and I kind of stumbled into our current home clinic through the referral of a friend, and we couldn’t be happier with the overall level of service we’ve been provided by our family doctor and the people that support him. Our clinic operates on a short-term appointment basis, meaning that there are no long-term scheduled appointments. You call when you need something, and they get you in ASAP, which is within three days, depending on the issue. This includes general maintenance like physicals. They do phone calls for non urgent issues, which I’m sure saves lots of time as well. For small issues, a lot of the emphasis in their clinic is to involve the patient in their own care and course of treatment and minimize unnecessary medicalization. I agree with their philosophies 99% of the time, which is pretty good.
Anyway, my blood clot vs. muscle strain drama started on Thursday, in a roundabout way. I woke up and noticed a few hives on my arm, but had a breakfast and lunch meeting, so I made the call to wait and see how they were by the end of the day. The last time I had hives, it coincided with my miscarriage, so I was a little unnerved, but the last time I had hives I was covered in them head to toe in a matter of a few hours, so I decided to see what was going to develop before I got panicky.
I made it through the day, and still only had five hives, but I decided that I’d call my doctor and see if I could get in before the weekend to see if someone could confirm that they were, indeed, nothing. I called when I finished work, and they said to come right down to their after hours clinic. When I sat down in a room to wait for the doctor, an hour after I’d initially called, I noticed my ankle was very swollen. After the doctor (not my family doctor, but one of his colleagues) checked my hives and confirmed that I shouldn’t worry about them unless they spread and gave a list of things I could treat them with while pregnant, I nodded at my ankle and asked her if I just needed to ice and elevate it, fairly confident that I’d over-walked it during the week. She checked it out thoughtfully, and agreed it could be that, but also noted that blood clots were more common in pregnancy, and if the pain got worse, or spread up my leg, I should go to emergency immediately because they had the ultrasound equipment to confirm it wasn’t a clot.
I heeded her warning and went about my day the next day, after elevating my foot overnight and skipping my Thursday walk. Feeling better, I went for a ten minute walk last night, and when I returned home, I noticed that the pain had spread up my leg a bit. It still could have been overuse, but at about nine, I decided that I’d rather have someone confirm I wasn’t having a clot than have one and end up in a bad spot because I ignored it. I have a history of heart disease and stroke on both sides of my family, and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
I live a ten minute walk from our local hospital emergency room. We drove over (because sore ankle), and began what we knew was going to be a very long wait, based on my last visit, with Matt the year before when he’d messed up his ankle playing softball too late to see our regular doctor. We moved through triage very quickly and got confirmation from two nurses that we were, in fact, better safe than sorry being there, and began the long wait to see a doctor.
I watched:
- A woman with a broken wrist, that was clearly in shock, wait five hours
- An approximately sixty year old woman with Downs Syndrome accompanied a homecare worker wait seven hours to see someone about what looked like a post-surgical infection on her calf (she showed me, and it was bad, and hadn’t developed in a few hours)
- A late teen girl who seemed to be having a bad miscarriage who came in right before us wait four hours with an IV in her arm. She’d been having problem for what sounded like a day or so
- A family of people who seemed to be regulars at the ER wait seven hours, see a doctor, not get the answer they wanted, and storm out, loudly claiming that the ER there had given someone they knew multiple sclerosis
- A man that was obviously high and possibly on the verge of OD’ing wait an hour or so while they scrambled to find him a detox bed to monitor him
After being quickly examined four hours after my arrival, I was given a requisition for an ultrasound to confirm that I didn’t have a clot that I needed to call to make an appointment for the next morning, since the young, obviously exhausted doctor didn’t want to give me medication without proof (fair enough), and the potential clot was low enough in my leg that it didn’t pose an immediate threat. I called this morning, and unfortunately, the ultrasound clinic was unable to perform the vascular ultrasound I needed on the weekend. I was informed that the doctor had made a mistake assuming he could refer me for a Saturday, even though the ER and the ultrasound clinic were in the same hospital.
After a minor meltdown and several other people telling me that I should in fact take what was happening seriously, but that they couldn’t help me, I called my family health clinic and was given several numbers to try, with the offer of a new referral for anywhere that would take me. I was unable to find one that wouldn’t require me to do the emergency room waiting game again (which averages 8-13 hours, I learned the night before), so I called my health clinic back to see if they had any suggestions.
Contrasted with my experience the night before, after a quick chat to confirm that I should come in, I got in to see my family doctor in an hour this morning (it’s a Saturday). He looked me over and said that he was 99% sure I was okay and that it was a newly formed varicose vein, combined with a strain, but that I should get back to emergency if anything changed. He also gave me his cell phone number (which he’s done before), and said that I should call him if I didn’t get the support he thought I should have received the night before (he was shocked that I hadn’t been scanned with a doppler or given a blood test and grumbled about the broken system), including a precautionary blood thinner if they couldn’t confirm that I didn’t have clots via ultrasound. He also said to avoid our local ER and go to Toronto’s best obstetrics hospital’s ER, who were better equipped to give me some answers.
The system in Ontario is badly damaged, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. In the past ten plus years, the Liberal party have worked to fix a system that was stripped down to nothing in the 90s. Through my experiences, I think they’re doing the best they can. One of the hardest things with four year elections is that nothing on a wider scale can be accomplished before the next election. I give them a lot of credit for ensuring most people have a family doctor (though I doubt many have one as responsive as mine), or someone they can see outside an emergency setting. I was grateful for that today. I think in time, they could continue repairs to the system, and hopefully half the people that I shared the room with will have community health care professionals they can visit before things become a problem. Maybe after that, I’ll be able to get effective emergency care the very odd time I need it in a reasonable amount of time, due to greater access to community health.
I realized today that, there is likely no end in sight to my future in the hospital system. As first time parents, we’ll probably end up at the emergency room a time or two (or much more than that), and my experiences today made me a little uneasy about that, but generally confident that I was better learning to negotiate the system, and that we had made the right choice on a family doctor, who we didn’t have to wait to sign up with and access four years ago when we decided we needed one.
In June, I’m voting to give the Liberals another four years to continue their work, in the hopes that my bad experiences continue to be fewer and further between. I’ve been following this election fairly closely, and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on cutting income taxes, which, would be nice, but not if it results in any cuts to the health care system. I’ll pay more taxes to make sure that doesn’t happen, because if you don’t have your health, what are you left with?
