anecdotes from the health care battles

Around mid-September, I started having problems seeing out of my left eye. Like through Vaseline. On the Saturday morning I set out to drive 300 km for Thanksgiving dinner, things had got suddenly worse, and the drive was unpleasant.

I'd made an apptmt with my doc at the health centre for late Oct. Asked her for a referral to the ophthalmologist (hereinafter the "O") the co-vivant sees. He likes him, and he's scheduled for cataract surgeries next June and August. We're both much too young; he's diabetic and blue-eyed and careless about UV, but I'm brown-eyed and have the lifestyle of a mole and have always worn glasses and usually sunglasses, don't know what my excuse is. I smoke, hit me.

The O gave me an apptmt for Feb and it couldn't be bumped up, and told me there was a waiting list of 14 months for cataract surgery. Meanwhile, the OHIP website told me 50% of cataract surgeries were completed within 4 months. And meanwhile, I'm the only driver in the household and I work by looking at a computer monitor 10 hours a day, and when my left eye can't see what it's looking at it tends to wander off on a frolic of its own so I'm seeing double, blurrily. And I don't even know whether it's a cataract I have; could be beri-beri, for all I know.

So on Friday last week the health centre said did I want to go to the hospital eye clinic, and I sorta said duh, forgetting it was me had asked for the referral to the O in question in the first place. And on Monday, two days ago, they called to say I could go that day or yesterday, so I went yesterday, and I have an admirable specimen of a posterior subocular (edit: no, subcapsular) cataract, I think it is. The new O oohed and aahed over it, and said it would take 10 minutes to replace my lens, and he could do it in the first week of December.

So why do people go to that first O I got myself referred to? We're going to wait until mine's done, then get the co-vivant scheduled for his in January with the new doc.

I tell ya, I was all set to shuffle off to Buffalo. I couldn't have gone 14 months with eyesight like this or worse, as it would obviously get. This kind of cataract apparently starts out slow and creeps up unnoticed, and then whammo, you can't see. Other people seem to have more notice and not to be bothered as much; the co-vivant is pretty nonchalant about his, and then right after he was scheduled, a few months after he was diagnosed with incipient cataracts, there's me out of the blue going I can't see! I can't see! My cataract is bigger and better than yours.

Googled around, and it seems that in Quebec, despite a Montreal hospital having set up an assembly-line cataract surgery facility, the wait times are still long ... and so, of course, there are private cataract clinics operating. The doctors at them have opted completely out of the health plan, as is allowed in Quebec. (So, if they were just working within the plan, the same number of doctors would be doing the same number of surgeries ... those particular doctors just wouldn't be getting quite as rich ... and people in situations like mine who couldn't afford to go private wouldn't be waiting quite as long.)

Frankly, some waiting time for surgery isn't unreasonable. What I wanted was a diagnosis in less than four months, and I got it in less than a week after I got the right referral, which I could have got in the first place. I suspect that I'd be regarded as a higher priority sort of case, if there really were long wait times, having no other driver to rely on and a job that is completely dependent on my eyes, but if I didn't work at a computer -- say, if I were retired, as most people with cataracts are -- I'd really get along just fine while I waited.

So anyhow, just had to boast about my cataract, and report that I'm not going to have to join the chorus of complaining about wait times after all.

High demand for cataract surgery is, of course, one of the things to be expected in an aging population. First us baby boomers started needing reading glasses, and now we'll be lining up for lens replacements. I'm a sort of mid-boomer, so by getting mine so young, I may have beat a bit of the rush. Make your appointments now, fellow 50ish-ers!

It was very informative. And I'm glad you are okay. :-)

And it's nice to hear it all worked out, in the end.

My boss and I chat regularly, lately on the subject of health care. He is a conservative and pro-privatization. When I explain that this will bring a "tier" approach to healthcare, which is against our Charter of Rights, his take was that we already have that.

That has not been my experience...

I go under the, um, ultrasound Monday noon. They use ultrasound to bust up your defective eye lens, then replace it with the bionic one.

Nurse Sgt-Major at the hospital assured me last week that this campaign is planned and executed with no room for problems, and no problems occur. So apparently I will be up and running, even if a little odd-looking (with one lens knocked out of my glasses), just about tout de suite.

The various nurses and docs and technicians and receptionists (all are required to say No, you're far too young to have a cataract! before proceeding) have all told me about teenagers showing up with cataracts, so you see, this is not evidence that I am old at all. ;)

I am apparently fortunate though that in my region an eye care centre was set up essentially to churn out cataract surgeries, or the wait time might well have been a little longer than the three weeks it boiled down to, once I abandoned the hot-shot doc I asked to be referred to and got referred to the eye care clinic that would have been the obvious referral in the first place. Moral of story: if you start seeing things as if through vaseline, don't procrastinate like I did; I'd have been all done by now, but if there had actually been wait times, I would have at least cut my time by a couple of months.

I'll be seeing you soon, heh heh.

We'll be seeing you around in your usual sharp form.