The Tragedy of Canadian Medical Care
Of course, I'm being sarcastic. Medical care in Canada is available, humane, and refreshingly free of paperwork and insurance industry death panels. Below is a letter received this morning from a friend whose wife was just diagnosed with breast cancer:
[Wife] and I just spent the morning at the cancer clinic. I was blown away at how efficient and agreeable the whole experience was. We are very lucky to have the Juravinski Cancer Clinic right here at the Henderson hospital ten minutes away. The place is a virtual beehive of activity. It gave us a good perspective on how rampant this disease is. It is a fairly new clinic with all possible facilities right there including treatment rooms, pharmacy, labs, examination rooms, teaching classrooms and really efficient professionals (from the receptionist to the nurses and doctors). They could not have been more helpful. Our contact person is a nurse who has done this a thousand times before, very personable and was extremely helpful with information. She answered all our questions thoroughly and ended up giving us a tour and a bagful of literature and write-ups on everything including the drugs used and the different treatments over the next six to eight months. She did all the scheduling for the various tests, a class on chemotherapy, the pre-treatment examinations and the actual chemo treatments. She explained everything she had done and wasn’t at all hurried. We have a really good handle on what our life if going to be like for the next eight to ten months. She even pointed us to wig and hat suppliers specializing in cancer patients.
The oncologist who met with us is part of the team of doctors at the clinic and was very good at explaining everything to us from the various drugs used, what we could expect in side effects, the worst case and best case scenarios, the procedures and treatments and timing for the whole process from today until next summer. There are nurses and a clinic doctor on call 24/7 in case you need help or advice.
We have a class in a couple of weeks on chemotherapy and [wife] starts the whole process on November 2nd. She will have chemo every two weeks for eight sessions. Each session is followed by eight days of daily injections to stimulate the bone marrow which assists in preventing loss of blood cells. There are also various medications for things like nausea and vomiting. In four months or so she stops the chemo, takes a month off and then goes for surgery to remove the affected tissue (breast and lymph nodes) and then gets radiation for a few months after that.
The only possible set back is a couple of more tests she needs to take to determine that the cancer has not moved into her bone marrow or organs. That would not be good. They are pretty sure it hasn’t judging by how fast this happened and how localized the growth appears to be, but need to know for sure to be more positive on the prognosis.
It sounds like the only expense I will have is a couple of the medications which are fairly costly, so the Maserati will have to wait. The good news is they have their own pharmacy and they work at cost plus overhead (they made a point of telling us they do not take a profit on the meds). Everything else is pretty much covered by OHIP. [Emphasis mine][OHIP: The Province of Ontario medical plan.]
Not the adventure I had anticipated at this point in life, but off we go!
[Wife] and I just spent the morning at the cancer clinic. I was blown away at how efficient and agreeable the whole experience was. We are very lucky to have the Juravinski Cancer Clinic right here at the Henderson hospital ten minutes away. The place is a virtual beehive of activity. It gave us a good perspective on how rampant this disease is. It is a fairly new clinic with all possible facilities right there including treatment rooms, pharmacy, labs, examination rooms, teaching classrooms and really efficient professionals (from the receptionist to the nurses and doctors). They could not have been more helpful. Our contact person is a nurse who has done this a thousand times before, very personable and was extremely helpful with information. She answered all our questions thoroughly and ended up giving us a tour and a bagful of literature and write-ups on everything including the drugs used and the different treatments over the next six to eight months. She did all the scheduling for the various tests, a class on chemotherapy, the pre-treatment examinations and the actual chemo treatments. She explained everything she had done and wasn’t at all hurried. We have a really good handle on what our life if going to be like for the next eight to ten months. She even pointed us to wig and hat suppliers specializing in cancer patients.
The oncologist who met with us is part of the team of doctors at the clinic and was very good at explaining everything to us from the various drugs used, what we could expect in side effects, the worst case and best case scenarios, the procedures and treatments and timing for the whole process from today until next summer. There are nurses and a clinic doctor on call 24/7 in case you need help or advice.
We have a class in a couple of weeks on chemotherapy and [wife] starts the whole process on November 2nd. She will have chemo every two weeks for eight sessions. Each session is followed by eight days of daily injections to stimulate the bone marrow which assists in preventing loss of blood cells. There are also various medications for things like nausea and vomiting. In four months or so she stops the chemo, takes a month off and then goes for surgery to remove the affected tissue (breast and lymph nodes) and then gets radiation for a few months after that.
The only possible set back is a couple of more tests she needs to take to determine that the cancer has not moved into her bone marrow or organs. That would not be good. They are pretty sure it hasn’t judging by how fast this happened and how localized the growth appears to be, but need to know for sure to be more positive on the prognosis.
It sounds like the only expense I will have is a couple of the medications which are fairly costly, so the Maserati will have to wait. The good news is they have their own pharmacy and they work at cost plus overhead (they made a point of telling us they do not take a profit on the meds). Everything else is pretty much covered by OHIP. [Emphasis mine][OHIP: The Province of Ontario medical plan.]
Not the adventure I had anticipated at this point in life, but off we go!