Health Care and my Fondness for Fingers and Toes

As a Canadian who has been spoiled with free health care my entire life, I have often been given to wonder whether the constant availability of doctors has made us into a nation of hypochondriacs. But when I compare my predilection to err on the side of caution with a system that allows a 12-year-old boy to die of a toothache (Washington Post Article) I start to think that we’re doing okay.

There have definitely been times when I’ve wasted the government’s money. For example, I probably could have stayed home that time when I *ahem* lost my tampon. Also, I’ve had more than a few panic induced calls to 9-1-1 when I was sure I was dying of nut allergy. There are other times, though, now that I think about it, that me dragging myself out to emerg was the right choice, even when I wasn’t even sure of it at the time.

I worked in a kitchen for two summers, and since I’m a perpetual klutz, I ended up slicing my hands up on more than one occasion. One time in particular sticks out in my mind – I had been using a paring knife in an entirely inappropriate way and ended up cutting a line between the second and third joints of my ring finger. It didn’t look so bad, just like a surface wound running diagonally along the top of my finger. It wouldn’t stop bleeding though, and soaked through bandage after bandage to the point that my Chef asked me to go home.
Heading home, I kept my finger elevated and by the time I drove past my house there was blood down my arm. I slowed down at my side street, but decided I may as well get it looked at. I had some medical tape at home, so I seriously contemplated just driving home and taping it up.

The wait at the clinic was joyfully short, but the receptionist was a little skeptical that I needed to see the doc for a cut finger. She was finally convinced by the amount of blood and a nurse put me into a room pretty quickly. When the doctor came in, he took one look and told me that I was going to need lots of stitches. I actually still disagreed that my finger even needed the work, after all, it didn’t hurt all that much and even though it was bleeding a lot, it just looked like a cut on the top of my finger.

It only took him about ten minutes to sew me up, and I didn’t bother going back to get the stitches out (tweezers and some scissors worked fine), when I saw the scar I realised what a good call it had been for me to go to the clinic – the scar actually started underneath my finger, and the slice had gone right through my finger, nicking the bone.

If I had lived in the States, it’s entirely likely that this would have been covered by some sort of worker’s insurance. My sister lives in the US though, and not getting going to the doctor’s office is more a state of mind. She doesn’t have insurance and even when she’s in Canada and fully covered, we can’t get her to go to the doctor’s for anything.

In a similarly digit-related incident, I had an interesting experience with faulty bandaging and a hematoma after some surgery on my leg went wrong. My toes started to go numb, and since they’d wrapped my leg so thoroughly and so tightly, there was no way I was going to be able to get through the bandages and plaster to check on my foot. By the next night I had lost all the feeling in my toes. It didn’t hurt or anything, just numb.

My mom took me to the emergency room at the nearby hospital, and though it was the grubbiest hospital I’d been at since I nearly died in British Columbia, the doctor was really nice, and he told me about his time working as a doctor in rural China while he cut the wrap off my leg. He ended up having to pry the hardened gauze off of my foot – my surgical incision had bled so much that the blood had fully saturated the gauze and it had gotten steadily stiffer to the point that it had cut off all the blood to my toes.

After all the great adventures-in-China stories, during which he cleaned the area and redressed my leg using a less-likely-to-harden gauze and some plaster to protect the damaged bone, he let me know that if I hadn’t dropped by, even if I’d waited until morning, I probably would have lost my toes. Scary thought. I like my toes.

Nothing life threatening, but I do think I would have been less than pleased to be living my life with nine fingers and five toes. My skiing would have suffered. Also, getting married without a ring finger may have been awkward. There are lots of times when people don’t realise the full extent of their injuries, or don’t know enough to guess the implications of their symptoms. Especially with the swine flu going around, when a fever and diarrhea could spell death, I’m much more comfortable living in a country where I don’t have to worry about draining my bank account for a false alarm. Instead, Canadians can go to the hospital, don a free hospital mask and have their health verified on the government’s tab.

I mean, taxes suck, but I think it's probably worth it.