Canada Makes Me Sick

I was always healthy in Europe...

Jun 08, 2024

When an 18-year-old high school graduate wanders out into the world, the first thing on his mind is “What will the girls be like”. The last thing on his mind is healthcare.

This week, I had an unexpected trip to the hospital. I walked out with a catheter. The good thing about having a catheter is that you don’t need to get up to pee in the night.

I still woke up at the usual time, but instead of peeing, I wondered what it is with Canada that makes me sick. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in hospital here. It’s not even the first time I’ve left the hospital here with a catheter.

This never happened to me in Europe. I stretched my gap year into four decades and lived in three countries. I was always healthy over there.

Norway

When I arrived in Norway, one of the things the locals were vocal about was their great healthcare system.

“If we’re in hospital, they don’t ask us if we can afford to pay before they operate.”, people said. “It’s free.”

Sounds like Canada, I thought.

Thanks to my height (I’m 5’10”) and the fact that we had a hoop in our driveway when I was growing up, I made the basketball team at the University of Trondheim. If less than six people showed up for games, I was in the starting five. One of my teammates was in med school. He used me as one of his test patients.

There was a small fee for Norwegians to visit doctors. When my friend graduated and opened a practice, he waived my fee. He said he just put a code in the system that said I was too poor to pay. I told him if he was audited, it would be fine because the tax authorities claimed my total income was less than half of what they considered the minimum existence level. I.e., I was too poor to pay.

After university, I got a job as a hotel security guard. Our state airline-owned hotel had a doctor on staff. It’s one of the ways I prove to people that Norway was an emerging market country when I arrived there. International five-star hotels in emerging market hotels have their own doctors and nurses.

Our doctor loved doing tests. One year, he even ticked the pregnancy box on the list of things he wanted the lab to check for. It came back negative. I never got sick in Norway.

Denmark

Tons of stuff happened to me in Denmark. I met the love of my life. She became my wife and I became step-father to a dance-crazy kid who entertained everyone who ever set foot inside our home. But I never got sick.

Upon arrival in Copenhagen, I was required to register with the Danish Citizen Services office to get a registration number and a health card. It was also mandatory to have a family doctor. When I said I didn’t know any doctors in Denmark, I was given a list of GPs registered in Copenhagen and told to pick one.

I visited the hospital from time to time, but only because our daughter had gimpy knees and wasn’t great on ice skates.

Thanks to extended healthcare coverage to company employees, the doctor who operated on the elite Danish athletes, fixed one of our daughter’s “girly” knees. (Don’t call me sexist, that was the official scientific name used by Denmark’s leading orthopedic surgeon.)

Just like a sporting superstar. “Girly knee” #1 went under the knife in 2005.

.My only visit to hospital emergency wards was also our daughter’s fault. I received a call from a very distraught teacher who’d taken the class on a field trip to go ice skating. Our daughter, who was 11, fell and loosened her front teeth. She suggested the teacher call me because “Paul is calm in a crisis.”

The teacher was not calm and couldn’t tell me what happened, where they were, or even if our daughter was alive. Our daughter took the phone from him and told me they were in the emergency ward at Amager Hospital. At the hospital, they said we needed to go to the trauma centre at Rigshospitalet, Denmark’s largest hospital with a full range of specialists.

We didn’t have a car, so we hopped in a taxi. I couldn’t look our daughter in the eye for fear of laughing. With her big front teeth hanging loosely out of the top of her mouth she looked a bit like a rabbit with a bad overbite. On the way to the trauma centre, the taxi was in an accident but the only damage was to our driver’s pride and the fender on the car that side-swiped us.

Like every good Danish kid, the dental surgeon had played with Lego in his formative years. With two loud clicks, our daughter’s teeth were snapped into place.

Belgium

Friends who worked at an embassy in Brussels connected us with their family doctor when we moved to the Belgian capital.

The doctor was a one-man show. No secretary, just him in a small office. You could make an appointment, or you could just drop in any Monday - Friday between 5 and 7 pm. The doctor was in.

He was well-connected, so if you needed to see a specialist, he knew just the right Professor. In my case, I was diagnosed with hemochromatosis. That means I have too much iron in my blood. I used to be Iron Man. As I aged, they worried I would literally rust from the inside.

The specialist professor had studie at the University of Victoria. We talked more about British Columbia than my condition. He was happy to inform me that the cause was genetic because his daughter was a world-leading specialist herself and had pioneered a treatment that quickly brings people’s iron levels back down to normal. I gave blood once a week, they extracted the red cells and poured the iron-free liquid back into my veins. When levels were normal, I continued to give blood every three months and was good to go.

Shortly after our daughter returned from her gap year, we visited the Emergency at Brussels’ largest hospital.

Our daughter was out dancing with friends. At 2:36 a.m. I received a call from a number my phone didn’t recognize. In my line of work, that wasn’t uncommon but this time the call wasn’t from a hotel in crisis.

“You have to come and pick up your daughter.”, the young Danish voice said. “She can’t walk.”

Then, before I could say anything, she said,

“No, it’s not that! She really can’t walk. It’s her knee!”

The unoperated “girly knee” had tapped out.

We took her home and applied ice packs.

The next day, Sunday, her knee continued to swell.

Even though our newly-arrived daughter wasn’t fully registered in the Belgian healthcare system, we decided to test it.

At the hospital emergency ward, we were greeted warmly by people who spoke limited English, but confirmed they could help. They also mentioned there would be a fee.

A young doctor arrived and checked our daughter out. She spoke excellent English and explained she had a good idea of what had happened and how it should be treated but because she wasn’t a specialist she recommended a specialist take a look.

“If you can wait ten minutes, I will get a specialist.”

The specialist, who was at least 28, came equipped with a Sharpie. In French or Flemish, I can’t remember which, he explained to the even younger doctor what had happened. He used the Sharpie to draw lines on our daughter’s knee depicting where things should be, where they were in her case, and little arrows showing the direction they would need to be moved.

The ER doctor was beaming. Her diagnosis and prescribed treatment were correct. She high-fived the specialist, put a cast on the knee and prescribed eight sessions of physiotherapy after the cast was removed

“Girly knee #2” After the cast came off, the Sharpie diagram on her knee remained for days until repeated scrubbing finally faded it away.

.When we checked out, we were given a bill. 100 Euros. Just over $100. We thought it was a downpayment. It wasn’t. ER doc, specialist, physiotherapy and pain medication were all covered. Belgian healthcare was better value than a beachfront all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas.

CANADA

I never had an issue in Norway, I never had an issue in Denmark, I never had an issue in Belgium… and then we moved to Canada.

I should have known better.

Canada has always made me sick.

When I was a baby I had pneumonia and a heart murmur. I survived. My mom worried about the heart thing, I wanted to use it as an excuse to be lazy but was interested in sports so I forgot about it and played hockey.

When I was seven, I got pneumonia again and spent a week in hospital. Probably could have been released after a few days but I spent too much time on the floor of my room playing with my roommate’s toy soldiers. There was also the incentive of staying up late. Hospital bedtime was an hour later than my bedtime at home. I was able to stay up and watch the Red Skelton show. When I did return home, I informed my parents that doctors’ orders were to stay up until at least 9 pm!

I spent an afternoon in hospital when an opposing football player stepped on my wrist and shattered all the little bones inside. They woke me up early from the anaesthesia because they needed my bed for a car accident victim. To thank them for the rude awakening, I puked all the way down the hospital hallway.

Then I was away for four decades, all of them healthy, and then I came back.

A year after we arrived here, I peed blood. Turned out to be a very large, very lodged in place kidney stone. The GP and the urologist were thrilled because it was just a stone and could be operated.

I was less than thrilled because I was supposed to travel for business. I cancelled two trips before the doctor could find a vacant time to operate. (Before anyone complains of waiting lists, this was only a few short weeks for a non-urgent procedure.)

The doctor was informed that I supposed to travel to Europe in mid-December 2019 to speak at a very high-level conference. The doctor said he could insert a special stent post-operation and clear me for travel.

I was on a plane to Vienna 36 hours after the operation. My brother and sister-in-law were living in Prague and came to meet me for dinner on the day I arrived. We had an awesome schnitzel and too many beers.

The calm before the storm. Little did I know that the beer from the amazing afternoon with my brother and sister-in-law would be with me for days!

After dinner, I returned to my hotel and 48 hours of hell ensued.

I constantly had to pee and, despite the litres of liquid I consumed, I could only void a drop or two at a time. I was in the bathroom every ten minutes.

The two-day conference had me as a closing panellist on day two. I didn’t attend day one. I found a pharmacy. They figured I had a UTI, but I’d need to see a doctor to get a prescription for antibiotics. Instead, I bought some painkillers and a box of Depends for Men.

Our bodies are amazing. I was in hell all night unsuccessfully trying to void my bladder. The understanding conference organizers moved me to the lead-off spot on the panel. “If you need to cut and run, you cut and run.”, they said.

My body behaved impeccably. I said my bit, listened to my fellow panellists and partook in an engaging discussion. When it was time for the closing networking reception, my body sent me back to hell.

I pulled on a Depends for the flight home and praised myself for having the foresight to book an aisle seat. Just like at the conference, my body gave me peace for the entire transatlantic flight.

Back home, the GP gave me antibiotics. No relief. It was a weekend and Christmas was coming.

We did the full test of BC’s out-of-office-hours healthcare system. Multiple 811 calls to extremely caring people. When they ran out of options, they offered to send an ambulance to take me to emergency. We took a taxi.

By the time we entered Emergency, I hadn’t peed a drop for days. I literally thought I was going to explode. Hospital emergency areas are chaotic, but the triage system worked exceptionally well.

The doctor who saw me looked like he was someone I went to high school with; 18 years old and with a laidback 70s vibe. He said a catheter would bring me back to life. The nurse tasked to insert the catheter looked to be about 14. (What’s with all these kids working in healthcare, I thought.)

I’m not sure if she was nervous because I was her first live catheter patient or if it was because she too thought I was going to explode. The insertion was met with an internal resistance the nurse struggled to overcome.

She was sweating when the doctor returned and peeked around the curtain.

“Got a tight one, eh? No worries, I’ll come back in a bit.”

His nonchalant approach was just what we needed. The nurse relaxed, I relaxed, and my wife, who was witnessing the entire spectacle relaxed.

My urethra relaxed, too, and the catheter found its way in. I became the personification of why people say they need to relieve themselves when they go to the bathroom.

I spent Christmas and New Year with a catheter and on January 9, 2020, returned to the hospital. The urologist and another teenage-looking nurse removed the stent that had been between my kidney and my bladder. He held it up like a fisherman showing off a prized catch and said, “This is the baby that caused all your discomfort!”

I thanked him and said I was grateful I’d been able to visit Vienna.

Two months later, Covid had shut the world down. We survived.

Earlier this year, I felt like I was returning to Austria. Tests showed no UTI so more tests were undertaken including an ultrasound. Nothing serious. The reason for my impressive urine retention capability was undetermined.

A urologist called me from the same clinic that had operated on my kidney stone. I guess the former urologist had turned 30, so they found a new one in his early twenties. I like him. In the official report that showed up on my healthcare profile he describes me as a “pleasant 64-year-old gentleman”.

He called me to invite me to visit him during his Thursday hospital clinic.

After visiting with the urologist, I called my father and said I had discovered time travel because, just like Christmas 2019, I walked out of the hospital with a catheter.

If you’re looking to pick me out of a crowd on the first warm-weather weekend, I’ll be the wacko walking around in long pants.

What is it with Canada? I was never sick in Europe…

At least I live in a country with amazing publicly-funded healthcare!

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