Straight out of Kafka

I'm going to be here all night figuring out how to start this. I spend so much time thinking up ways to seem eloquent, yet usually throw down crap, so I'll just get on with it.

This evening's sonata is dedicated to the Ministry of Health, the Premier of Ontario, the Prime Minister of Canada, and the pharmaceutical industry.

While standing outside the sliding doors to the emergency room with my friend as he lit a cigarette, I suggested to him we invite Michael Moore for a visit to bear witness to what we were seeing before us. If you are familiar with his line of work, Mr. Moore will laud Canada for its "socialized medicine" that allows us to seek medical care without being handed a bill, and rightfully so, for we ought not have to worry about having to pay to get well. The problem is, the people in charge of this system don't seem to be doing a very good job maintaining it, and while each of us has access to care, the care we receive is not exactly praiseworthy. In fact, it is cold and bureaucratic, much like a prison or government office; its patients are not people, but files passed from one bureaucrat to another, while the policy makers who preside over it pop into these institutions once in a while for a photo opportunity and scurry off to their private clinics where they receive the best care money can buy.

I will harken back to this time two years ago when I decided to walk over to the local walk-in clinic because I was not feeling very well. I don't feel the need to delve into minutiae, but I can say I felt like a file the entire time, having been passed from reception to the waiting chair to the doctor to the waiting chair to the lab to the pharmacy each time. That was it: I went to the doctor, and he sent me to the pharmacy, where I had to pony up for the pills that were to make me well again (luckily for me, at the time, I was employed full-time with a fairly extensive health insurance plan, a luxury not everyone has, and those who have it have a tenuous hold on it for fear of being laid off). At one point, I was diagnosed as being hemoglobin-deficient while being prescribed a medicine for gastrointestinal reflux disease that inhibits absorption of iron into the body, iron being sorely needed by someone low in hemoglobin. What happened here? Suffice to say, I have not seen that physician since, though I made it clear I find no fault with him, he being so overwhelmed with the tattered conditions in which he has to work. I just hope he is not content to count his riches.

How much can a doctor possibly do when s/he only sees us for fifteen minutes at a time? None of my sessions with the physician seemed much longer than this length of time - Hell, I spent more time waiting to see him than I did with him - though I hadn't really thought about that aspect until a good friend of mine, a naturopathic doctor, raised it. I, myself, have never been to see a naturopathic doctor - precisely because it is not covered by our "socialized medicine" - but I take her word for it when my friend tells me she has witnessed miracles from its practice. Golly, who'd have thunk that my body was a system, rather than a collection of isolated parts? How is my friend doing, you ask? Well, she has to work two part-time jobs on the side because she hasn't enough patients to pay the rent, and she lacks patients because the Ontario Health Insurance Plan doesn't consider naturopathic and homeopathic approaches "real medicine". If that isn't enough, the national government has tabeled Bill C-51, that appears benevolent on the surface, as it calls for stricter controls on the food industry, but is quite devastating to those employed in and seeking holistic medicine, as it aims to strip naturopathic doctors of "practicioner" status and make a slew of supplements available by prescription only, prescriptions issued only by medical doctors, prescriptions unlikely to be issued over pharmaceuticals.

Okay. Back to my friend and me standing outside the hospital. We were there to support a dear friend of ours who was trying to check herself into psychiatric care because she had lost control of her bipolarity and was plagued by pervasive thoughts of suicide. She spent a total of sixteen hours in emergency before being admitted, during which time, she slept for about two before being rudely awakened by staff who wished to train the hospital's residents on how to use the electrocardiogram - you would think these people would read patients' charts before trying this sort of thing, especially when they are about to wake a patient who has complained of not being able to sleep - and had a hulking male security guard threaten to restrain her because she was sobbing and wished to use the telephone. Once admitted, she called to tell me how cold she felt the staff to be, with a few notable exceptions. Her doctor seemed very helpful, she said, but people like these seem few and far between in this vast loveless labyrinth. From her description, it seems many of the nurses act more like prison guards than care workers. My friend went to the hopsital on her own accord because she needed help, and today, feels it has made her worse.

This is where I normally do the finger-pointing. Whom can we blame? Can anyone be blamed? Can we fault the staff for being trained in a certain manner and given limited resources? Can we blame the doctors for doing the same? How about the upper crust of these hospitals for concerning themselves more with collecting a fat pay cheque than seeing to it that their institutions are in proper working order? Or the politicians in Ontario for agreeing to give themselves a twenty-five-percent pay hike? Or the pharmaceutical industry for ensuring its products are pushed on these people in need? Or we, the people, for allowing all of this to happen? Or those elements who draw our attention away from all of this by painting a superficial picture of society's ills? Quite a nefarious web in which we find ourselves entangled. Where exactly does the fault lie?

I am reminded of a beautiful line from a rhyme by Dead Prez: "we can blame it on the system, but the problem is ours." In other words, we may not have created this horrible mess in which we find ourselves, but it is up to us to act. Time and again, we have waited for policy makers to act for us, and time and again have been disappointed: one side prides itself on universal medicine, yet fails to provide adequate support; the other seeks a system only those with turgid pockets can access. Perhaps it is time to show our policy makers and corporate heads just whose hands make these wheels turn. Perhaps we ought to inject the sterile halls of these ivory towers with love and compassion. Before this can happen, we have to start loving and respecting one another, and we cannot possibly do that by accepting the stereotypes and glib interpretations our media feed us; no, we need to start listening to one another, to our experiences, our feelings, our situations and how we navigate through them. We'll be on our way to getting ourselves out of this mess by opening our eyes and ears to what is transpiring around us: we can't find the solution when we don't understand the problem, can we?