Dang. Sorry about the wait. Maybe they are hoping if they are slow enough about it, you’ll be in menopause by the time your surgery date rolls around and then you won’t need it anymore. 
Has your husband looked into the vasectomy yet? Wonder if you can get one of those any faster …
Yes. If you need emergency services, they’re dealt with - well, emergently. My gallbladder issues weren’t as severe as I gather some other things are. It was managed quite easily until I could take the time off of work to have the surgery done. I could have had it the following week or the week after if I’d had the time.
Now, come on, Calgary gets that. The winter of (thinking…) 1992 we had two weeks of weather like that in Calgary. And, 1996 was like that in Central Alberta as well.
Oh good. It can be a wait to see a specialist here too though, and dealing with private insurance is no treat either. I am currently fighting with my insurance to cover the medication my Dr. prescribed, they want me to try several other kinds first. There are many people in the U.S who point to Canada as a model health care system though so it is interesting to hear the good and bad of both systems.
Well, after you’ve waited in the emergency room or on the gurney from your ambulance for seven hours or so (tying up that ambulance for the whole time because the EMT’s can’t just dump you and go), chances are that you might get your surgery soon. If you’re not actually dying, chances are also good that it will be a couple of weeks before it’s done.
If I recall correctly, Calgary has one of the highest rates for people dying while waiting for heart surgery. Urgent cases do take priority, but when you have (for illustrative purposes) 5 surgeons and 50 urgent cases, well, you do the math. Cut-to-the-bone economics coupled with a huge population boom are making things very sketchy here healthcare-wise.
Let me say here that these are not criticisms of the healthcare workers, but of the system that has been allowed to fall into such a state by politicians with their eyes on the bottom line and over-looking the actual human cost of their policies. Yeah, Alberta is debt-free. I would have preferred to take a little longer to get debt-free and still have some infrastructure left intact.
I’m in Edmonton, and all of my (two) surgeries were on an urgent basis, and were done quickly. I broke my ankle at 3pm and had surgery the next morning before 11. Then I had very heavy irregular menstrual bleeding, took a (very expensive, but covered by my drug plan) medication to temporarily stop the bleeding and had a D&C to remove a polyp in about two weeks.
So I don’t have any faults with Canada’s health care system with regards to urgent care. However, the wait times for elective care can get much longer. (Especially as how the government defines “elective” and how you do might not coincide).
I knew a woman who saw her OB in February for an elective tubal ligation. She actually saw the OB very quickly. However, she then got placed on a waiting list for the hospital to call her to book a surgery date.
In October (eight months later) they called her to book.
She said that, unfortunately, she couldn’t.
They asked why.
She said she was pregnant. :eek:
They said :smack:
She said :mad: :wally Now, she loves her youngest daughter to death, but doesn’t trust that non-urgent medical care will be provided quickly.
But that would be socialist! :o
Don’t even joke about that. My husband and I are quite vocal about our total lack of interest in having kids, and I am aware that fate is a mean old bitch with a truly cruel sense of humour.
(matt, don’t tell anyone, cause I might get lynched in Capitalist Calgary, but I have a few Socialist leanings. Shh.)
Sorry, not a joke. However, that was about 6-7 years ago. Hopefully waiting times here in Alberta have gotten smaller since then?
No, they’ve actually gotten longer. You can’t gut a healthcare system and then put it back together again over-night. I just did a little research to see if my perception is accurate, and yup, Canada has unacceptably long wait times all over, and they’re not getting any better. In fact, Alberta isn’t even the province with the longest wait times - that would be Saskatchewan and the Maritime provinces. I guess I should just be thankful it will be only a year’s wait. :rolleyes:
There is a healthcare crisis going on in all of Canada, there has been for a long time now, and while the government (federal and provincial) makes lots of noise about it, I don’t see things changing much, and I don’t see how they can change. Our political system isn’t set up to look at things long-term, when one government tears down what the last just built.
I understand the frustration in waiting - I have no patience either.
But it is ELECTIVE surgery, and in the minds(?) of the healthcare system, it’s very low priority, which honestly, I’m okay with.
What is much more frustrating and frightening, is that a friend of mine had to wait months for a colonoscopy and then he was diagnosed with colon cancer, with 6 months to live. They figured if they had diagnosed it sooner, his chances would’ve been much better, but by the time it was detected, it had spread to other organs.
featherlou, it could be a lot worse. Here in SK a baby girl was experiencing chronic pain, but the mother was told she couldn’t get a consultation for a few weeks. The mother wouldn’t have any of that and thought something was really wrong.
They went to Alberta, and within a few days found out the baby has leukemia. Yeah, that’s SK healthcare for ya.
Oh, and I’m not even going to get into the fact that my future sister-in-law’s father collapsed just before Christmas, they couldn’t get anyone to do a brain scan until around New Year’s, and the biopsy didn’t come until after that, and then results weeks after the biopsy. It took more than a month to find out he has an inoperable brain tumor. :mad:
Ahhh fate is a prankster. I know 2 couples who got pregnant while waiting for the husband’s vasectomy date. Doh.
Going to ER if you are not gushing blood in the U.S. means you are in for a long wait too, usually. When I went in to the hospital to get a hydrascan for my gall bladder, it was supposed to just be a scheduled test. Test went as planned, except the Ensure they had me drink brought on a gallbladder attack and when the technician came back into the room and saw me crying curled up in a ball, she had my test results read pronto, (I failed spectacularly) called my on-call Dr., and he told me to go through E.R. and get admitted since he thought it would be faster than him admitting me upstairs. :rolleyes:
So I went downstairs to get admitted, since my Dr. had called ahead to get me in I thought it would be quick. 10 hours later I was admitted. I don’t think there is a quick way through E.R. unless you are about to die in the waiting room. This is at a very good hospital in a medium large city.
Yeah, I’m not understanding why your hubby doesn’t get snipped? It’s such a simple procedure and it means YOU get to avoid surgery!
Ah, waiting times for doctors. I just want to know which putz decided in the 90s that Canadian Universities were turning out too many doctors.
This post has been Farenheited by the Farenheiter!
Well, I’m joining in this pitting.
My uncle, recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, started experiencing some unusual side effects of his medication two days ago, twitching of the jaw and facial muscles. The instructions on the box say contact your doctor.
Well, it’s day fucking three, and I have STILL yet to speak to the doctor at The Foothills who prescribed the meds, although I have spoken to pretty much everyone else on the chain. All I need(my uncle isn’t quite fluent in English just yet) is a simple “keep taking it/stop taking it” message, and since stopping the meds for more than a few days can easily trigger a relapse, I’m going to be very annoyed if I don’t get an answer sometime in the next 3 hours. 
I work mainly emergency medicine in Canada but do some family medicine stuff too. Though emergent procedures are usually done quickly, getting it done quickly can easily mean making phone calls for an hour or three, trying to find a place with available beds, surgeons and the desire to do the operation.
Elective procedures are another matter entirely. Doctors offices tend to refer to a small group of specialists in one area and by travelling outside the area the waiting times might differ substantially.
Some doctors in Canada are hideously overworked, 80+ hours per week, and referral problems affect the doctor as much as the patient. Our system does need more doctors and more centralized control over where capacity exists. In practice, however, more administration seems to mean more managers who want cushy jobs and who think health care is more about money/business lines than patient care. Don’t get me started.
Isn’t medical education the same in Canada as in the USA? How hard is it for Canadian MDs to get licensed in the States?