Day 20 & 21 – Whatever Doesn’t Kill Ya…

I’ve been up for 36 hours now and I haven’t taking a real break until just a few minutes ago. Yesterday, after dinner, I was sitting on a recliner chair with my two young sons playing in the same room. My youngest son wanted to get onto my lap and when I moved back to bring him aboard his hand got caught in the scissor mechanism of the recliner. I wasn’t aware of any trouble until my wife cursed and said there was a lot of blood. I will not go into the details but it was not pretty. My wife and I shot into action – I took my eldest to my neighbors for the evening and we went to our local emergency medical centre with or injured son.

This is where it all breaks down. If you’ve seen Sicko by Michael Moore you have an idea of the American Medical system. Canada figures prominently in the film juxtaposing the U.S. system. The problem is that the Canada health care system has problems of its own that really need fixing, sorry though, I digress.

It took us 4 hours to see a doctor, with a child bleeding from a large opened wound and in severe pain I would hate for any parent to go through this. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a triage nurse and the medical people were very friendly but I saw many patients get treatment before my son that were laughing and running around like it was a play date. When we saw the doctor she gulped at the damage and concluded that we would have to go to the
Children’s Hospital on the other side of town. Greatful for the assessment but concerned for our son, we packed him into our vehicle and went to the specialized hospital with a letter describing the seriousness of the injury, an email to the hospital and a phone call to speed up the process all from the medical centre doctor.

When we got to the Children’s Hospital we felt confident that our son would be seen shortly and his pain alieved before too much longer(even if the waiting room was full of people). Guess what, another 5 hours and we finally see a doctor. I was totally frustrated and at 4:00am I was having trouble concentrating.

This Doctor was great and very professional and determined that the hand would need plastic microsurgery to repair nerve and tendon damage.

So today we waited all day in a hospital to see our son’s suffering stopped. This was not meant as a rant but I guess it kinda came out as one. I find it incredible that I can have such respect for these medical practitioners but despise the medical system they work under.

Of course my diet fell apart and I had no exercise at all. I ate some bad for you food from the cafeteria and vending machines and when I finally had time for lunch, it was processed meat, bread and condiments. This was the best I could find in what should be the highest representation of health and wellness in our society.

I am writing today/yesterday (all of it is one big time span) off and looking forward to getting my son back healthy and repaired, ready to recuperate. I'll let you know how it turns out.

See you soon.