Category Archives: Health

OHIP and turf toe

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Last Saturday I stubbed the big toe of my left foot on a plastic crate that was full of wine bottles. No. I hadn’t been sampling any of the contents of the crate, but the stub was quite hard. I thought little of it until the next day when my foot was red, ugly (actually, my feet are always ugly, but it was particularly  ugly) and swollen. I had difficulty walking.

On Monday my wife packed me off to a local clinic to see a doctor who didn’t say much other than, “x-ray; I will call you later today”. I had the x-ray and the day ended without a phone call. The next day I called the clinic’s office and asked for a result.

“ We don’t give results over the phone” was the response.

“But I was promised a phone call yesterday. At least tell me if there was a fracture”, I remonstrated.

“We would have called you if there was a fracture” was the response.

“Could you at least confirm that and get back to me.” I replied.

“I’ll leave a note for the nurse, but if you want to discuss this further you will have to come back in.” And sit for hours in our waiting room with dozens of other sick people who are all coughing up blood. She didn’t say that last bit.

I would not have bothered with a doctor’s visit for this if it had not been for the fact that we are off on a trip to Europe this week and it will necessitate a lot of walking – or hobbling.

Today, feeling no better, in desperation, I called a private foot doctor who specialises in sports injuries. Unlike my OHIP employee, he came to the phone immediately and told me that I probably had “turf toe”. “The second joint of your toe is compressed”, he said. “Try pulling on it to relieve the pressure and wiggle it horizontally to break adhesions. Also use a stiff soled shoe and tape it to the next toe.” This was free advice. After a few minutes of pulling and wiggling, my foot felt profoundly better.

Now, to be balanced, a good friend has just had a double lung transplant and is doing well; this was all courtesy of OHIP without which it would have cost millions of dollars.

So, if you need a lung transplant, OHIP is there for you. If you stub your toe, call a private practitioner and bypass the overweeningly arrogant government subsidised quacks who are unable to use a telephone or recognise that the toe they are inspecting is connected to a human being.

Canadian health care at its less than best

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From here:

Earlier this month, 82-year-old Ontario woman Doreen Wallace was walking out of a hospital in the Niagara Region when she had a fall, literally in the hospital’s front door. She cut herself badly and fractured her hip. If you’re going to take a tumble, you have to figure that a hospital’s main entrance is a pretty good place to do it. Not so, as it turns out — the hospital refused to admit her, claiming that the hospital could only treat her after she’d been attended to by paramedics. Call 911, they were told, and wait for an ambulance.

As if that’s not bad enough (and it’s plenty bad), after her incredulous son made the call, the woman had to wait almost half an hour while an ambulance was brought in from another region. None were available locally, even though three were already at the hospital where Ms. Wallace had her fall! While people are understandably shocked at the thought of an injured woman laying in a hospital going untreated due to a bureaucratic requirement, the real scandal is that not only was a precious ambulance assigned to this task, but that none were available for 28 minutes.

First of all let me say that my experience with Canadian health care has been moderately good: I haven’t had to resort to calling 911 very often, but when I did, the response was quite fast. In fact, recently, it was so fast, I had two policemen appear on my doorstep even before I called 911 (the phone line was faulty and making calls on its own, apparently). After searching the house and casting an expert eye over my wife in search of bruising, the officers left with the satisfaction that comes from a job well done – to my chagrin, they never did say evening all.

Secondly, the ambulance episode doesn’t surprise me that much. When my father-in-law fell in his retirement home, the resident nurse was reluctant to help him up because it wasn’t part of her job, although she did manage to struggle to the phone to place a call to us. We drove to the home and, after delivering a brief but concentrated barrage of caustic sarcasm (well, that was me mostly), my wife and I picked him up ourselves.

Thirdly, it’s time for 82 year-olds to develop the respect for bureaucracy that it deserves: remember, when you fall down and break something it’s not about you, it’s about the process and metrics and making sure that the God-forsaken Kafkaesque nightmare you are about to enter has had all humanity extracted from it  – in order to serve you better.

When should a job be left for an expert?

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Here is one example:

A man stuck a butter knife into his belly in a failed bid at self-surgery to remove a painful hernia, police said Tuesday.

The wife of the 63-year-old Glendale man called paramedics on Sunday night and told the emergency operator her husband was using a knife to remove a protruding hernia, Sgt. Tom Lorenz said.

“She said he had impaled himself with a knife,” Lorenz said.

Officers found the man naked on a patio lounge chair outside his apartment with a 6-inch (15-centimeter) butter knife sticking out of his stomach.

The man’s wife told officers that her husband was upset about the hernia and wanted to take it out.

While waiting for paramedics, the sergeant said, the man pulled out the knife and stuffed a cigarette he was smoking into the bleeding, open wound.

Here is another: