A Clean Bill of Health

In the past six weeks, I’ve been to the Emergency Room, had a blood test, two cardiographs, an X-Ray, an ultra-sound, and finally a HIDA Scan to see what was wrong with me. The result? Nothing. I first had to go to the hospital due to severe chest pains. There’s no knowing what a heart attack feels like until you have one, and I haven’t had one yet, and I was worried that was the cause. Turned out it wasn’t and my heart was fine. The doctor looked at the results of my blood test and X-Ray and thought it might have been gallstones. The ultrasound showed it wasn’t that either. My gallbladder was enlarged, however, so I had to move on to a HIDA Scan to see if it was healthy. It turned out it was. So I took every test I could take at the doctor’s orders, and I still have no idea what happened. I was out of commission for a whole day with chest pain that spread into my back, until I could barely stand up, and there were times I couldn’t even so much as lie down. Did I have some sort of gallbladder attack? Is that even possible? Who knows? There’s no point in pursuing it further unless it happens again.

Thank God I live in a country where health care is free, though. I’d hate to go through all that just to learn nothing was wrong with me, and end up with an enormous bill. Worse still, I could have needed surgery, compounding my financial problem with health problems. How do people survive in those situations? I was already trying to figure out how I’d pay the bills if I had to take time off work and go on short-term disability. If you add hospital bills to the mix, then you’re looking at bankruptcy.

The turnover time was pretty good too. People complain about long waits in our health care system, but if you break down everything I had to go through, six weeks is a good time. I was tended to immediately when I went to the hospital with chest pains, and when they figured out it wasn’t really my heart, it was a relatively short period of time before I moved on to the next stage. The longest wait was for the ultrasound and HIDA scan tests to come back, which took a week each. The HIDA Scan itself was booked in a relatively short period of time.

So I guess Canada kicks a little ass. I feel bad for Americans.