July 3, 2022. I am still not sure what has hit me. I was working before my electronic master, the computer, Thursday evening, when I started getting pains in my right shoulder. I took a break from writing, did some stretching, and took some anti inflammatories.
I am getting fairly old. I have complex and chronic medical problems but I have learned to manage them. For over two years I have kept away from medical places where covid bugs will tend to lurk.
But the pain got worse all through Canada Day here in Sunny Toronto, and I could not sleep that night. Early next morning, I was on Toronto Transit (TTC) heading for the hospital. There was no avoiding it but I dreaded what I was going to find.
A long weekend is a bad time to develop a medical problem.
Here in cautious Canada, most people on the streetcar were still wearing masks. This was a pleasant surprise to me. I had not been on TTC in months and had been given the impression by local Twitter twitterings that people had generally bought the idiot idea that the pandemic was over.
Of course, in my own neighbourhood, a sizeable proportion of the population is still wearing masks when in the shared air. The ’mask’ and ‘no mask’ clans generally stay out of each others way.
The biggest cause of friction is elevators. Often someone points out the sign advising people to continue masking in the building’s common areas. This sometimes brings a snarky “we don’t have to” response.
On the other hand, there are people who will sit with masks on in the park with no one around them. This really is absurd, say I with my highly superior knowledge of things covid. There are rumours about people who wear masks while alone inside their apartments.
I arrived at the ‘Emerg.’ I found the situation quite calm. Ambulance crew and some wheel chaired inpatients lounged on the lawn by the entrance.
I suspect that I arrived there at a good time. I have read many accounts of people sitting in emergs in Ontario for twenty hours, and of four hour waits for ambulances. The hospital system by available statistics is indeed breaking down. Read about it here and here.
However, I have made more trips to emergency rooms than most people my age, due to my chronic conditions. I have been in much more frantic emergs than this. I recall thinking that a major disaster must have just occurred, from what was going on around me.
However, that was merely a breakout of lunatic austerianism from one of the more lunatic conservative provincial governments, in that case in Alberta. Reality always forces such slash and burn fanatics to back off. Nonetheless, it is a disturbing experience when you are hurting and really need an adequate response.
Covid is different. Covid really is going to collapse the health care system. It will be much harder to recover from this than from a mere outbreak of ‘hate everything social’.
The local emerg was functioning well enough when I was there. However, I could tell what times I was living in. There were enough staff around, though they had even more of the world weary look than is usual for emerg people.
A security guard waved a ‘blue bagger’ mask at me as I came in the door. I pointed to the much higher quality mask sitting on my face and made clear that this was what I would be wearing while in there. He did not pursue the issue.
This removed my first cause of anxiety about being in there. However, most of the staff were wearing the same surgical type masks. Only one nurse was wearing the same type of mask I was.
This was puzzling; if this one rebel could wear a proper mask and stay employed there, why not the rest of them? Even the doctor had the blue bagger on. The nurse taking my blood pressure had her face a foot from mine, pouring out used air through the puckers on the sides of her face.
The waiting room was sparsely occupied and the only unmasked person there was clearly having some mental problems. No emergency room would be complete without at least one person talking loudly to his/her self and complaining about being stared at.
The air quality in the premises was hard to assess. The layout of emergency areas is not conducive to good air circulation, with all those partitions. I could locate no CO2 monitors or air filters.
I asked very politely about the CO2 count in the place and where the air filters were located. I got some mumbles to the effect that the situation was adequate. This did not entirely reassure me. People are catching covid from hospital visits.
I was only in there for a little over an hour. In that time I got an x-ray of my shoulder, which showed some swelling but no injuries. I got my heart monitored. I got an injection which very effectively relieved the pain in my shoulder.
I got a prescription for Tylenol3 and recommendations for some ‘sports medicine’ doctors who would likely have solutions for my problem. I was soon back out in the fresh air.
Back in my neighbourhood, I filled my prescription for hillbilly heroin. I will see my own doctor on Tuesday, for the first time. My old doctor has left family practice, saying he wants to focus full time on sports medicine, which is ironic.
I feel fortunate to have found a temporary solution for the pain with so little trouble, during a pandemic and all its problems. I will feel more fortunate if at the end of ten days I have not had a visit from mister C. And, of course, this does not cure my original problem.
I am sure that I and my topnotch masks will be spending some time at physiotherapy and ‘sports medicine’ clinics. I am really frightened of having a painful malady like this and no effective treatment and resolution for it.
I went through something like that when I was much younger. That is something worth recounting briefly.
I was still living in Alberta. It was before the Canada health act had been passed. Some subhumans in the Alberta government of the time decided they did not want to provide health insurance to ‘single, unemployed employables’ like me.
I had an infected gall bladder. I got very roughly thrown out of a hospital emergency room. I could have died. The policemen who brought me back to the hospital and ordered them to treat me, likely saved my life.
That was the worst moment of my life. But I heard one of the patients who was behind the curtains near me yesterday being was told that he has an infected gall bladder. It is a common problem among people who lose a lot of weight quickly.
I eventually left Alberta because of the endless hate against ‘socialist medicine’ and disabled people. I eventually arrived in Ontario. I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake settling here, although public health care is always subject to attack in every province, from every political party.
Thus, the attempt by the Ford creeps to ‘delist’ medical procedures and see if people notice, is something I have seen before. The cuts to services always seem to roll back over time. However, I have not seen such an ugly government before, outside of Alberta.
And of course, we have not seen something like the covid crisis before. It does not threaten merely the health care system, but the food supply and almost everything that people like me depend on. All kinds of vital services seem to be short of competent people and those still in place seem stressed.
The Covidian age is a bad time to be old, sick, and poor. There could be a serious breakdown of government. The wise old man long ago said the collapse of government would lead to life that is nasty, brutish, and short. Life for people like me could be especially shorter.
Provincial governments across the country, rather than seeing the dangers presented by covid, seem to see it as the hammer with which to finally break the health care system, as well as various other social programs. The dark forces have had a bee up their asses about medicare from the time it was introduced.
All I can do is blog about it. However, I do not want to take a ‘chicken little’ approach. My experiences yesterday show that the system is still holding together.
What it will take to keep it from falling apart is a topic for plenty of future blogs.
Thus there is so much to blog about. I had thought to leave off it until my shoulder problem has resolved. Perhaps spending so much time typing is aggravating it.
However, the keyboard keeps luring me back. I now have here another brilliant blog post ready for launch.
Here it is. Be enlightened.