One patient’s journey through the health-care gates of hell
By Rose Simpson
Most people have a horror story about bad health care.
It’s nobody’s fault. We are a country that offers taxpayer-funded (not free!) health care to people who expect Cadillac service from a system that operates on a pork-and-beans budget.
My friends complain constantly about their family doctors.
When I suggest they cheat on their doctors and get a second opinion, they all recoil in horror.
“But what if my doctor finds out?” Terry whispers. “He’ll boot me off his roster and I’ll never find another family doctor!”
Perhaps it’s rogue argument, but my attitude might have saved my life.
A bit of history. My family doctor announced two years ago he was retiring and sent his whole roster—1,500 of us—into a tailspin, cutting us loose into the great health-care abyss.
I went shopping for a new family doctor at clinics near my house, where happy owner-operators were delighted to take my name and OHIP number and introduce me to myriad fresh-faced doctors. Even though I put my name on five lists, I came up as sad as a newly emptied bedpan. In each instance, the doctor suddenly disappeared days after my interviews.
Where did they go, I wondered. Off to Tahiti or maybe the States?
So I was grateful to find out my family doc had a change of heart and decided to resume his practice. I went back to him, even though I never liked him. Better a GP in the hand than a GP on the run, right?
Dr. Ben was a nice man, but he was useless. I suppose it was the little things, like the time he mistook my skin cancer for a bedsore (for four years). Or the time he tried to give me a pap smear and couldn’t find my cervix.
It seemed that he had literally slept his way through medical school.
Worst of all, he treated me like an old person.
“I have really bad knees,” I said. “Maybe it’s arthritis.”
“Well it happens at your age. Just walk around the block a few times and put some ice on them when you get back.”
“But I can’t walk.”
Silence. No referrals and no ideas I couldn’t get from Dr. Google.
Same when I asked him to help me lose weight.
“Just eat half what you eat now.”
The last straw was when he ignored my symptoms and nearly missed diagnosing my colon cancer.
At no time did he ever suggest I needed a colonoscopy.
After that fiasco, I realized I needed to take action. I went to a local clinic advertising new doctors and found one who would change my life. He wasn’t taking patients because he was an internist who was on a restricted practice license for unprofessional conduct, or some such. I decided to take a chance. I mean, he couldn’t be worse than Dr. Ben.
I asked Dr. Jerry to renew my blood pressure medication since I needed a refill. He sat me down, whipped out a fancy cuff and took my pressure six times. Then he ordered a bunch of blood and urine tests.
“You need to be on a higher dose for your blood pressure,” Dr. Jerry said. “I suspect you’ll need a higher dose for your cholesterol, too.”
It turned out that the meds I was taking were putting me at risk for heart issues, so he upped the dose of blood pressure medication and my statin for my cholesterol.
“Anything else?” he asked when I came back to see me.
“Well, I have really bad anxiety.”
“Do you snore?”
I shrugged.
“Ok, I’m ordering a halter to check your heart, and I’m sending you to the sleep lab.”
Turns out, my heart is great but I have severe sleep apnea which explains a lot: Why I’m tired all the time, why I wake myself up in the middle of the night, why I have heart palpitations.
Now I’m just waiting for the hospital to call to fit me for a C-PAP machine—so that I can scare my husband into thinking I’m an alien in the middle of the night.
My family doctor has never even mentioned that I try any of these tests. It’s only because I cheated on him that I gained some insight into what was happening to me. He doesn’t care that I cheated on him with Dr. Jerry, either. He’s too busy trying to find other women’s cervices.
The views expressed in this Opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine or its publisher.
