Blogs
We go in. Late afternoon sunlight slants through the window. Cotton-ball clouds against a blue, blue sky. Mr. X’s face is turned towards the light. His hoarse breathing, the only sound in the room. He sits, shoulders slumped, huffing and puffing away. His white hair tangled. He looks small. Alone.
He turns towards me, his eyes hopeful.
My heart sinks. With his age, his other complex illnesses, his frailty, his physical exam, Mr. X doesn’t look like an easy intubation. Worse, he faces a high risk of death on the ventilator….
My son and his friend were stopped one day by some kids who wanted to “test” them for Coronavirus because they were Chinese.
A few restaurants in downtown Toronto are now refusing to serve people who look Chinese. Across Ontario, comments are now made to kids who look Chinese that they should stop eating bats, that they are somehow dirty and should be quarantined. In Australia, patients will no longer shake the hands of a Chinese doctor.
This is racism triggered by fear of the coronavirus epidemic.
Disruption is the latest buzzword, but the fundamental meaning is the same: change. Everywhere you look across Ontario, the country or even around the world, there is growing pressure to transform health care — how it’s funded, how it’s delivered, how it’s even conceived.
Medicine, a profession thousands of years old, is under pressure to change.
Yet.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
It took Kirsten Hudak and I most of a day and three planes to fly out to northern Ontario’s First Nations communities: Toronto to Thunder Bay to Sioux Lookout to Keewaywin and North Caribou Lake First Nations reserves. Roughly the same amount of time it takes to fly across the country from Toronto, ON to Vancouver, BC.
None of it prepared me for what I witnessed. Life is hard up here, hard in ways that it simply shouldn’t be.
A newborn baby died 2 weeks ago in Northwestern Ontario — a rare event in a first-world healthcare system.
A woman, pregnant and bleeding, needed emergency surgery. The situation was so dire that her baby died on the way to the hospital. The clock on her life was ticking. The city's one and only anesthetist was away. Frantic calls were made until a Doctor came out of retirement to save her life -- but not her newborn baby.
The exact location of this tragedy doesn't matter -- Fort Frances, Dryden, Sioux Lookout, Red Lake, Kenora, Atikokan, certainly any First Nations reserve. All of Northwestern Ontario has been under-serviced for years.
