First, I want to offer my condolences to you, Mr.me Lanctôt, I feel the sadness of your still recent mourning by reading your letter in The duty. I also hear the dismay you have experienced while going through our fabulous health care system and that concerns me for all sorts of reasons.
Everyone who has had to walk through the corridors of a hospital recently probably has a story to tell. To put it simply, the hospital has become a real mess.
I would like to say, however, that I know that I have good colleagues, that I or my family also receive good care, at the right times, from good professionals and that many are even exemplary. But I also know that the opposite is just as present and that it is beyond understanding.
I am a nurse and I too have probably spoken too loudly and shocked patients in hospital corridors. I am sorry for that. Sometimes we exaggerate, it’s true. But that shouldn’t happen.
I recently had to be hospitalized in an emergency corridor, on a stretcher, because there was no room available. At some point, an attendant decided to move my stretcher further down another hallway because, she told me, I could still stand. She sighed so often looking at me and gave me so many silly looks to make me understand that I didn’t belong here that I’m not about to forget her.
I stressed for an hour for fear that I would be forgotten for my scanning. Fortunately, the doctor made me return to my place in front of the station, because my situation required that they keep an eye on me at this stage.
Sleeping in a busy, neon-lit hallway isn’t easy enough […] even less when behind the sorting station, the personnel talk so loudly, and this, for hours, that it becomes impossible to doze off. I couldn’t sleep, even sick as a dog, because the staff had too many fun to chat at two o’clock in the morning without realizing that the rest of us would perhaps like a little silence? I couldn’t believe it.
Ambulances arriving one after another, no room in the corridors, a doctor for all the patients at night. And the toilets. Horrible. […] If my nurse had seen what a dirty floor my fluid had been lying on, she would probably have disinfected my tubing before connecting my antibiotic. I said to myself: ben coudonc, at least I’m on antibiotics, hoping that it covers the E. coli.
I’m still young, but all the other patients around me were in their seventies, I thought to myself, but how are they supposed to recover, to heal, in a corridor like that, next to the door, in the cold and in the noise?
My father had cancer, too, and he died, fortunately, a few months before the pandemic. It saved me and my brother from getting arrested for breaking into a hospital. I tried to tell the nurse one day that it was not going well and that she should be given a scanning before his radiotherapy treatment. I felt like I was talking into butter. I insisted that I was a nurse. No result. Within days, his condition deteriorated to the point where he ended up in an ambulance because the aggressive radiation therapy had perforated his intestine and that’s why he was in so much pain. Two weeks later he died.
Another time I had an abscess on a tonsil. The triage nurse was inexperienced and sent me away with an appointment for the next day at a clinic for pharyngitis. A doctor gave me pills even though I told him I had trouble opening my mouth and thought I had an abscess that needed to be drained. I had to puncture it myself two days later, with a syringe and a needle, and I had to go back to the hospital with my pus in a small container and I got angry so that, finally, I was made see a doctor who understands the situation.
I said to myself: what am I going to have to do to get people to listen to me? That I threaten to file a complaint? That I get angry? I also wonder, why aren’t my own brothers and sisters more supportive? Why is the network so inhuman? I am a nurse, but when I go to the other side, I rather have the impression that we are judged before being treated.
I would have plenty of other examples and situations to tell. But I want to say it again, not everyone acts like this, I have extraordinary colleagues, nurses and doctors, who provide high quality care. But there is such a pervasive nonsense in our health care system at the moment that it is beyond comprehension: we have a serious problem with the quality of care.
Rigor in our care, respect for patients and quality care should be priorities. But when hospitals turn to making incontinence pants out of pillow cases or suspending a nurse for “stealing” a buttered toast peanuts in a patient’s cabaret, it’s a sign that nothing is going right. For years, doctors, nurses, orderlies and all the other care-related shifts have been trying to make themselves heard by the government. But it’s getting worse.
I wanted to write to you, Mr.me Lanctôt, because I wanted to tell you that no, it makes no sense that you have to fight like this to receive care. I’m also writing it to you because it relieves me to be able to say to myself: well no, I’m not crazy, I’m not hallucinating, the system is completely out of whack. And I am sincerely sorry that you and your spouse had to go through such hardships in these conditions.