Anyway, a few days later, I found myself in a situation where I had to go with a friend to the emergency room in the Jewish General Hospital in Cote-des-Neiges for a serious problem that needed immediate attention since my friend was bleeding. First, whether you are bleeding or dying or broke your bones or you are 100 years old... you have to take a number and wait in the first waiting room for the nurse to see you.. once seen by the first nurse and she asks all the necessary and unnecessary questions, you move into another room where you are registered and given another number after presenting your medi-care or any health insurance card. You then wait in the waiting room where there are hundreds of people each with a different complaint until you are called into the ER.
There were people who have been waiting for 6 and 7 hours before they are called into the ER. Of course for me the ER in Canada has to be something like Grey's anatomy Mac-dreamy doctors, or ER series or any of these series that make us believe that this is how doctors function in developed countries.
My friend was scared and in pain, and we were lucky, they let us in and we were met by a distorted picture of Dr. House. He made a quick check and scan through the vagina with an intern student asking her questions as if we are in an oral exam. Anyway, he was not happy with the results so he asked for a more advanced scan for which we waited for another good three hours..
What shocked me then, we were received by .... hear me well... a Saudi doctor with a beard till his stomach... short trousers and broken English. He was on training in the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal... what a hypocrisy.... Saudi Arabia doesn't admit to overt relations with the Jews, but they train their doctors on Radiology with them.....
Then we were moved back to ER, where the "Doctor House" listened to the Saudi Doctors report and could not understand a thing (Technology they hear reports on the phone) so he asked for a Resident Doctor to check my friend. This took us another three hours. In the meantime, a student came and made the first opinion and asked my friends questions about her life from before time. All this time my friend has cramps and is almost crying of pain....
Through this time, I had created friendship with all other patients in the ER... all in the peril that we were all in... One old Polish lady was there since 8 in the morning with a broken ankle left on the side until late in the evening without water or food. She could have passed away without being noticed, and another Italian Young man with a disc attack, they dismiss him when he was crying of pain, and another lady with her daughter who was suffering from a gastric flu that seems to be very common these days in Montreal and highly contagious....
Many many stories during our wait for the resident to arrive and see my friend to dismiss her from the hospital....Arrives the resident tailed by her student, she is Kuwaiti doing her PHD at the Jewish General Hospital and already knew about us the Egyptians in the ER.
What truly made me think is the double standard of countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, they have their doctors and students be taught by Jew doctors in a big hospital like the Jew General Hospital, but deny any attachments or liens with any Jew otherwise.
And the second thing is the delay in seeing and dismissing the patients from the ER. We have seen 3 shifts and we were still there waiting for the resident doctor to arrive to be dismissed, they definitely have a huge shortage in doctors or maybe it is simply the government health care system that is not really working as it should be...
Who knows, but two Arab doctors in a Jew Hospital in Montreal with Egyptian patients is more than a coincidence, don't you think??
I'm kind of new to this blogsphere world we'r living in, however i admire the way you approached this subject !! My friend who is Egyptian too was telling me about this and as you did at the beginning i couldn't believe what i was hearing about the lack of doctors and the long hours that patients had to survive through in order to get checked. However, after reading your experience i fully beleive what i got told earlier.
ReplyDeleteAlso you got me thinking about the two Arab doctors and how could they be trained in a Jewish Hospital. This raises a lot of questions that must be taken seriously in the near future.