Deja Vu Again

I had nausea again yesterday. I'd gone out for lunch with a friend, although I didn't really want to, and by early evening I was abed, where I stayed until this morning.

I seem to be fine now, having a cup of coffee as per usual, although feeling a little bit like life is one step forward, three-quarters of a step back.

Another friend had a distressing Wednesday, involving our healthcare system, and it's possible I over-empathized, making myself sick, but I don't think so. I think it's more likely I should not have gone for lunch when I wasn't gung ho about it.

I feel like I could go to bed and sleep some more. Hours? Days? Weeks? Months?

I wouldn't call it a panic attack. The nausea wasn't so overwhelming I had to purge everything from my body. A couple of Gravol helped, whereas in prior attacks it had no effect.

What good is universal healthcare without enough doctors? Wait times are destroying faith in the system but I know for a fact my 14 hour overnight stay in emergency, sitting in a chair with a badly broken wrist and broken knee until the morning shift arrived for duty, was because there was only one doctor available for a waiting room full of people in need of a diagnosis.

I'm not a REAL expert in healthcare resources but it seems to me the bottleneck is doctors, or a lack thereof. I mean, I and every nurse on duty, many of whom seemed to be waiting with us, knew I had a badly broken wrist and broken knee, so what's with having to wait for a doctor to confirm it?

Sure, I wasn't an emergency, but I wasn't not in extreme pain and distress, either, exacerbated by an overnight wait in a chair in a crowded waiting room. Triage made a bad situation worse, for me, anyway, and I was ahead of a possible ectopic pregnancy.

She had a family doctor, too. She's the one who said she'd rather pay than have to wait. I told her to bite her tongue. Ford Nation would have us paying AND waiting, don't be fooled.

What good will Pharmacare be without enough doctors to prescribe the drugs they love to prescribe so much we've got antibiotic resistant bacteria thriving in our hospitals now? Do we even really want Pharmacare? Aren't we drugged to the gills as it is with Canadians really needing less stress, better diet and more exercise in our lives?

The fluoxetine I was on could've been a placebo and I would've made the changes to my lifestyle that reduced anxiety anyway. And the therapy I was so lucky to get would've helped me see the light regarding my relationship with food. If anything, fluoxetine was suppressing my appetite when what I needed was more calories.

People who think they can afford the privatization of our public healthcare system will vote for it and Conservative politicians and their friends know it. Boomers and GenXers have lots of money, along with healthcare benefits that include drug plans. What they don't have is the access they want as they age. And who can blame them? They paid into the system all their lives with the promise it would be there for them in older age. It's not. And I live in Ottawa, not a small city or rural town.

I know what I saw while I waited 14 hours overnight in an Ottawa hospital emergency room and it was a system that's ceased to function as it should, a society that's not looking after each other, and a racket instead of a government in charge. And I know for a fact, because a nurse apologetically confided to me the next day as I was leaving the premises, there'd only been one doctor on duty overnight, hence the 14 hr wait.

One doctor on duty overnight in an Ottawa hospital. One. Lots of nurses, not seeming to me to be using their skills much beyond handing out painkillers. One doctor.

We're being treated badly by our government, punished for insisting on universal publicly funded healthcare even while it privatizes increasingly large swaths of it for insiders like former premier Mike Harris. We know this. His young wife runs a nurse staffing agency that's sucking our money out of hospitals and nursing homes and into his pocket and yet he continues to get away with it.

Why? Who wants this? How is any of this okay?

Staples? We're going to be renewing the healthcare cards we should never have had to pay for at Staples?

Wtf?