Adventures in health care

I was in severe pain yesterday from an unidentified throat injury, so I decided to pay a visit to my local clinic, where I was refused treatment.

The dumbass on the front desk -- who admitted to being a nubie -- told me my health card had expired. Immediately, I thought I had destroyed the wrong card, so I left the clinic, more than a little mad and embarrassed.

I renewed my card last July along with my driver's license, but I hadn't used it, being adverse to medical intervention of any sort. I knew I received a new card, so spent about two hours scouring the house. Alas, no health card in sight.

So I sat on my Ekornes chair with a glass of red to dull the throbbing pain and felt sorry for myself. Then I thought, wait a nanosecond! The picture on the health card is exactly the same as the one on my driver's license, so THEREFORE...

I picked up the card and sure enough, it was my new, non-expired health card with the date 2015 on it.

Should I have noticed this at the doctor's office and argued?

Yes, but the decision to visit the doctor's office was made at the spur of the moment -- on a wine run to the LCBO which is next door. I hadn't brought my reading glasses so I had no way of knowing whether what the dumbass had said was right.

By the time I donned my glasses, it was too late. The clinic was closed.

So I sit here today in pain that might have been eased by an antibiotic last night.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, Marissa had a bad headache and stiff neck, so she went to the emergency room where she and Jeff waited the usual six hundred hours before being seen.

"Eek," said the resident. "It looks like you have meningitis."

And with that, Marissa received her first ever SPINAL TAP.

She didn't have meningitis, of course, maybe just a virus, so they sent her home in painful agony, thanks to the six foot needle they stuck in her spine to drain out fluid.

Did they figure out what was wrong? Or did they give her any drugs?

Nope.

And down the road, Doris is languishing in her schwetty little apartment without the benefit of any home care, with nearly-dead Bob schlepping to the store to buy her food. There would be no therapy as promised by the CCAC because she didn't need it.

Really, they just needed the hospital bed so they made up a bunch of shoddy health care lies to get her out on her keister and badly broken foot.

Socialized medicine. Gotta love it.