Eddie's ER Adventure
| 1372 words
| 2026 | Personal | Disability
Alternatively, "How I became victim to Canada's abysmal healthcare system."
Content warning: This article mentions details about hospitals and acute gastrointestinal illness (including vomiting). Proceed with caution if these topics are upsetting to you.
Being someone who's chronically ill, hospital visits aren't anything out of the ordinary for me, including a fair amount of instances where I needed emergency care. Of course, I only go to the ER if I think I'm dying these days, as most emergency physicians won't have the knowledge or expertise needed to treat acute episodes of chronic conditions. So, even if I'm in some of the worst pain imaginable, I won't go to the ER unless I think something is seriously wrong.
With that said, the fact that I had to go to the ER earlier this month should tell you how bad things got for me, to the point where I had made the decision to go. What would be ahead of me, however, was something I wouldn't have ever been prepared for.
During the afternoon of Tuesday April 7th, I started to experience off-and-on gas pains. These are pretty run-of-the-mill for me, given I've had issues with my gut health since I was born. But I started becoming concerned about what could be wrong when the pain got so bad that I nearly vomited. At first I had assumed that maybe I caught a bad bug, or perhaps I was just having a really bad round of stomach pains, until I remembered that my mother had suffered from similar symptoms that ended up with her being diagnosed with appendicitis and needing immediate surgery. With this family history of appendicitis and the severity of my pain in mind, I figured that it would be best for me to go right to the emergency room, in the event that I could be experiencing something life-threatening.
It was 8 in the night by the time I left for the ER, and when I got there I was astonished at the amount of people who were in the waiting room. Despite this, I kept a rather optimistic view of things, thinking to myself "Surely if they hear that my symptoms are reminiscent of appendicitis, they'll be able to help me as soon as possible." And at the beginning I was right, having gotten through triage and had blood and urine testing done just under an hour of waiting. What I didn't anticipate, however, was having to wait another 12 hours just to be seen by a doctor and have my symptoms discussed. Apparently, there had only been two doctors working during the overnight shift, and because of this, wait times were estimated to be over 10 hours. Even so, I tried my hardest to keep my frustrations at bay, partially because I was foolishly in disbelief that someone who's possibly in a medical emergency of this nature would get shafted this hard.
It was by the 5 to 6 hour mark before I managed to get a cubicle and could at least lay down on a bed instead of sitting in a wheelchair for the whole night. And from there, we'd wait for another good few hours for someone to see us, because we still hadn't been evaluated by an actual doctor or gotten any imaging testing during all this time.
It wasn't all bad though, because they very easily could've not given me any medication, but I was given tons of it to try and mitigate my pain while I was forced to wait. Two doses of injectable Toradol, and some IV Gravol managed to keep my pain to a tolerable level and helped stop my vomiting for a little while. IV Zofran didn't do shit though, and they didn't give me the Gravol until way later in my visit.
By hour 12, I would finally be seen by an actual physician whom I could talk to about my symptoms and get actual help from. He was very understanding and thorough with his examination, I'll give him that. Our first step was to do an ultrasound on me to see if my appendix is visible and/or intact, and I got that done about a half hour after I was seen by the ER physician, so I'll give them that.
After all of this trouble I've been through, it turned out that I didn't have appendicitis or any other life-threatening conditions that could've caused my symptoms, and would be discharged from the hospital after having been there for nearly 14 hours straight. Unfortunately, I'd leave without having any solid diagnoses or any leads as to why this episode even occurred, so I'm back to assuming that this was either just another bad flare up from my lifelong gastrointestinal problems, or some really nasty bug that I happened to catch from somewhere. I'm leaning more towards the former though, because I'm still having intermittent stomach pains that feel the same as before, just in a milder form. Plus, I still mask everywhere I go, and while I know they aren't foolproof, it's still hard for me to believe it was viral or bacterial.
I've known for ages that Canadian healthcare has always suffered from doctor shortages and long wait-times, leading to overall poor patient satisfaction rates. I've known that countless people have died in this country either waiting endlessly for help, or through programs like MAiD being pushed on those with perfectly treatable conditions that could otherwise be solved with the proper social, health, and housing infrastructure. I know this because I've ended up falling through the cracks as a result of these decisions being made by our governments, with many of my chronic health conditions not getting diagnosed until later in my adulthood, and others still having yet to be identified and diagnosed.
These problems have only worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic, with Conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario specifically putting strain on the healthcare system by intentionally drawing funding away from it in order to push their plans of privatisation. This has resulted in many doctors leaving their jobs, unable to cope with the strain of the long wait times and high demand from these snipped budgets, leading to these wait times becoming even longer.
This is all by design, because if you can convince people that these problems are the result of free healthcare, then they won't resist as much when you privatise their healthcare, under the guise that this is "what's best for the people." Even though, in reality, these politicians don't actually care about you or the fact that you may die waiting in the ER due to problems that they themselves have caused. Until they themselves are forced to wait 14+ hours in an ER while in agonizing pain and sickness, I don't think any of these politicians will ever understand what's "best for the people," because it's all just about money and lobbying for them. If they can't earn a cent from your suffering, then what's in it for them?
I wish I could end this post on a more positive note, but I can only hope that things will get better from here on out for our healthcare system. It would drive me insane if I didn't have any sort of hope in the idea of the world improving, even if I know deep down that things likely aren't going to change for the better any time soon. Considering how much worse things have gotten in the almost three years since my mother had her appendix removed, I think we're unfortunately going to have to see things hit rock bottom first for change to be made.