So, I Went to Hospital
Quite the event experiencing an emergency, doubly so, I guess, during a pandemic. The great thing about Multiple Sclerosis is that it is a chronic disease. So, in a weird way, there was no stress on hospital staff to help me get better—not going to happen—while I was visiting, and my presence was a terrible inconvenience as de-stressing on my part was the surest way to end an acute episode of MS. It is such an annoying disease.
I did the quarantine tango to basically let my body collapse. It gave my family a month off of dealing with me, and I recovered in the Alzheimer ward of a satellite division of the local hospital.
Staff, there, deserve medals.
I am so used to hearing the bad news about Long Term Care facilities, it was a different experience actually being in one. Mind, my ward was more a transitional one with most patients waiting for home services to be arranged—like me, after a long time of refusing to admit my family needed help—or for places to go. I was also in hospital as the institution was overwhelmed by the failure of a Long Term Facility that enabled the spread of Covid 19 and the subsequent death of 69 people. A lot of older people came to emergency all at once.
On a tangential note, it is so weird to read about the economic costs of closing things down verses the sacrificing of the old. It is as though proponents of the commerce agenda expect never to age. Maybe that is why there is so much discussion about the right to die. The business class want the right to suicide before they reach retirement? I don’t know. I like old people. I kept my mother-in-law in our home till she died, naturally, at 102. I see value and wisdom in age; listening to the rhetoric of our politicians, they do not. I don’t think they recognize it amidst their loud mouthed belligerence. I digress.
I was actually the only patient who knew they would go home. Which brings about another tangential thought: the privilege of being handicapped. There is a rental charge for my wheelchair, for the hospital bed in my home, for the lift that helps me to move about. There are charges to build a ramp in my garage. Like I have a choice in usage of these services. Like my 70 year old husband doesn’t have to be 1 of the 2 people needed to operate the lift. Like I can go to the bathroom on my own.
Like I choose to live this way.
What a joke about Canada’s socialized services. The care team is fantastic to help me, but it’s a bit ridiculous all of them know about outlets that provide funding for more assistance.
Because the government accepts the hypocrisy of businesses making money off sick people but refuses to recognize people, often, just become sick. Multiple Sclerosis means my brain does not talk to my body. It is not contagious. No one knows where it comes from.
There is a probability Covid 19 is an infection that is a consequence of factory farming; no one is discussing that needed economic change. Though as mink farming in Denmark has illustrated, it must be stopped. I digress again.
One of the nurses on my ward had to deal with an Alzheimer patient who had a violent episode. Security was called, but no one lost patience as everyone on staff knew the patient was trapped somewhere in his own mind. An Italian lady sang songs from her childhood but what about the others stuck in horrific memories?
Staff was very kind. And empathetic. And overworked and understaffed and asked to do so much more than take a pulse or wipe a bum.
It is a tremendous privilege to have watched people be kind.
But, then, I was in a hospital. In as much as the services are socialized, there are not enough; how can they be remotely similar in places run for profit or should I say a buck?
Long Term Care places cannot afford to offer sympathy.Heck, two of them in Ontario offered vaccines to board members rather than staff so little did they care for employees. The army had to be called in to rectify abysmal conditions in other Long Term Care facilities.
It turns my stomach a former Premier of Ontario, democratically elected, went into the Long Term Care business to take advantage of those who elected him.
I refuse to go on.
The people in the hospital were very kind, I will never forget that.