Let’s talk about today’s medical adventure.

Got dropped off by Joe and Julian. They have been so good to me through this whole bullshit with the thing on my leg.

There was a wait at Reg because apparently the lady working there suddenly had to do a whole whack of paperwork while a pregnant lady who quite possibly was in for induction {{1]}today waited patiently, and another customer waited behind me.

Me, I was in no particular hurry. Not compared to being with actual emergencies. Sure, I was somewhat annoyed by the delay, during which she disappeared entirely twice. but that’s because it left standing and therefore in pain.

Pain makes people impatient. Remember that, we will touch on that again later.

What worried me most was that I overheard her saying something about her partner not showing up till 3 pm, and it was 2:25 pm when I got there.

So I thought she was going to just leave and then we all would be stuck waiting until 3 pm before we had a chance of being served.

Now that would have been unacceptable for me and I was just a fat dude with foot pain. But it was definitely unacceptable for the poor pregnant lady waiting to find out if she would be giving birth today.

So I have started quietly seething, and forming a whole speech about what it means to have responsibility and that it doesn’t matter if you were supposed to be allowed to leave now, it is your responsibility to stay at the job until your relief arrives.

I mean, you’re not flipping fucking burgers back there. You’re dealing with people
who are having one of the worst days of their live and who despertately need medical attention that they can’t get until you do your goddamned job, lady.

But of course, she came back five minutes later, was profusely apologetic, and got down to business, leaving me to ponder my own mistrust and paranoia.

Things went smoothly for me after that. Drop the purple form off, nurse comes and hooks up the IV, and so on.

But once more there was someone in acute distress in the ER waiting room. He was a Polish man with great foot pain that kept him from even being able to walk and he had been waiting to see a doctor for hours.

And then the doctor shows up and she seems kind and sympathetic but she doesn’t listen when he says pain relief is the most important thing to him and goes on to talk about how she can’t do anything because his doctor works out of Royal Columbian and they are on a different computer system and therefore she doesn’t know what work has already been done on his foot.

And I am thinking, so call the fucking Royal Columbian and get someone to read his goddamned file to you. Or fax it to you. Or email it to you. Or TEXT it to you.

My point is, this is a easily solvable situation, and you would see that, Doctor Useless, if you would just pull your head out of your ass and put the patient first.

Oh, I almost forgot : She also said she couldn’t call the specialist working on this poor suffering man because it was Sunday.

I don’t fucking care! The poor man is in terrible pain. I don’t care if you have to send a black ops team to physically abdiuct his doctor and drag him here, that goddamned doctor has a responsibility to his patient and that’s the most important thing.

It’s noit the patient’s fault he got sick on a Sunday, god dammit. And the response, “Well, you got sick on a Sunday, sucks to be you!” is….

But that’s as far as that poor Polish man got. Once her blatant incompetence and the extremely unacceptable nature of her responses started to make her uncomfortable. the doctor just told him she was going to go off and check something, and never came back, at least not in the half hour I was there after that.

And I could tell the guy was crushed by all of this bullshit. He had gone to the hospital thinking (not unreasonably) that they would ease his pain, and had pinned all his hopes on that,. only to be ignored for a couple of hours then got told they couldn’t do anything for him because of file systems and Sunday.

NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE. I kept my thoughts to myself but I really wish I hadn’t. This man clearly needed someone to advocate for him and I am just the person to do it.

I would have told that goddamned doctor to call the Royal Columbian and get the man’s file and do what it takes to get him some relief. Even if that means hauling his specialist off the golf course for a few minutes. You’re a healer, god dammit, and that means you are here to relieve the pain and suffering of your patients, whatever it takes.

And if she’s asked me if I was a doctor, or otherwise made an appeal to authority, I would say “No I am not a doctor, but you don’t need to be a doctor to know how the phone works. It’s true that I have no official authority over you and there is nothing I can do to force you to do what I say. But if you walk away know, you will walk away knowing that you are leaving a patient to suffer because you are too goddamned lazy to make a freaking phone call. ”

By then security would have shown up and tried to get me leave.

And I would go once I had said my piece.

It would have severely complicated things for me, but I would not care because someone has to stand up for what is right. Someone who has the tools needed to wake the system from its usual stupor and force them to face reality.

I mean, that doctor was waaaay too comfortable telling that dude she couldn’t do anything. She didn’t even seem to be trying to help him. She did not care. She had already dismissed him and was already on to the next patient
in her mind before she said one damned word to him.

It makes me want to just hang out in the ER and advocate for people, because they clearly need it. I’ve been treated fine, but others are clearly getting stepped on by the the big bad system.

And when the big guy steps on the little guy, the first thing the little guy has to do is stomp on the big guy’s toes till he is paying fucking attention.

And I have the feet and the weight and the big big mouth to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] As in, “inducing labour”. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get it, it took me a while and a fair bit of brain work to figure it out.[[1]]