Life back in Canada

Robert is back, and together (yay!) we shift gears from teachers' strikes back to life in Canada.

Before Robert’s trip to Mexico, he and I had gone to a Service One office and signed up for OHIP, Ontario’s socialized medicine. Finally the three month waiting period is almost done, and in two weeks we will get the id card (in my photo I’m wearing Hostess Mom’s red and black scarf) that they keep asking for everywhere, and I will be in. Finally I’ll fit in and look like everyone else! Or not. Robert noted his surprise to the nice clerk lady (of course he did) when she took our word that we’d crossed the border March 25^th. (We could have said April 25^th and saved our mission board lots of money. But we didn’t. Canadians are so honest.)

Once in the OHIP system, Ontario will pay for the rest of my cancer treatments. And my heart surgery, if it comes to that. That’s up to Dr. Cynical.

Dr. Cynical is a very small Asian man with very stiff hair that sticks straight up. The first time I ran into him, I had just heard someone call out, “Dr…(let’s say Francis…it could have been a woman’s name), so I did think this was a female doctor. I had noticed that some doctors introduced themselves by their first names, but unempathetic ones like Dr. Blue and Brown or Dr. Cynical would not think of this. The last doctor who gave me a first name was the resident learning the ropes from Dr. Bald in the ER. She wasn’t pushing the heart-stopping fluid into my vein fast enough, so Dr. Bald quickly took the syringe (he did it nicely, but I noticed), and rammed the stuff home. It worked (feels like they are flushing your brain, by the way, but this time my AHHH was a silent one, so be proud of me). I’m going to keep count of who gives me first names. More women? Younger doctors? The nurses all give me first names. Hmmm.

I had said in another post that Dr. Cynical is a witty but cold, calculating man. Let me tell you what he said, exactly. He was telling me that what is happening to my heart is not life threatening. In fact, my heart is healthy. Sometimes the electrical pulses controlling the heart can short circuit, causing the pulses to double up and all of a sudden push up the heart rate. When the circuits close, the rate goes back down immediately, from 200 to 100, from one beat to the next. It’s a strange relief. Dr. Cynical went on to explain that everything he does is a guessing game. The tachycardia might be worsened by the cancer; it might not. The beta blockers might work better than the calcium blockers; they might not work at all. They might give me side-effects; they might not. Surgery might fix the problem; it might not. Very helpful, all that. Thank you, Dr. Cynical.

After all these conclusive explanations, Dr. Cynical said this, and Robert heard it, too: “You could get an ablation (this is where Dr. Cynical would feed a catheter to my heart and burn the spots where the pulses are short circuiting), but I don’t want to do some invasive heart surgery and then find I have a metastasized, dying patient on my hands. No, we’ll wait until the cancer treatment is completely finished, so, a year.” Welcome to socialized medicine. The government is the most unempathetic decision-maker of them all, and it’s not going to waste money on someone that’s dying, or on nonessentials such as nausea meds or gentler (but more expensive) chemo regimens. On the other hand, no one gets left out. We are all in this together. I guess if I had to choose, (which I did, I guess, marrying a Canadian 25 years ago), I would rather everyone get a little harsher treatment, but we all survive, even the marginalized. But that’s me. Meanwhile I try to stay objective, too, and pleasant, and see things from these spiky people’s point of view. Robert is helpful in that area. Welcome to Canada.