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Ontario emergency room wait times

I continue to read about hours waiting in the ER rooms in Ontario despite the imposition of the health tax by "liar, liar, pants on fire"' McGuinty. Why do Ontarians continue to elect this Norman Bates lookalike is beyond me, and then complain when he does exactly the same things he did in his last term (little to nothing).

What should happen at the hospital is to have an emergency department and and a non emergency after hours type of clinic co-existing, you walk in, get triaged and sent to the appropriate area. Your health records should be electronic and available there.

The health care system in Ontario is about 20 years or 30 years behind the times. First all the doctors are scattered in private practice all over the city, they should have offices in the hospital. Second, the after hours clinic should be in the hospital, or at least one non urgent clinic. Your health records should be centrally electronically available, not locked up in some doctor's office somewhere, unavailable because it is not office hours or he is on vacation for two weeks. Third, adequate resources should be allocated to emergency rooms, and because there is non-emergency clinic, there is no need to "punish" everyone in order to discourage the "abusers" who walk in with cuts and scrapes.

What you have to do now if you are injured or feel a chest pain is to decide if your illness/injury can wait and phone your family doctor, if you are lucky enough to have one, and lucky enough to get one in less than a week, and if it is the doctor's office hours, not his day off or a weekend. If not you have to figure out if it it the hours of an after hours clinic, becuase the 1-2 hour wait will be better than the 2-6 hour wait at the emergency. None of the previous? Well you are stuck going to the emergency, where they have no files on you. The police can pull me over in the middle of the night on a rural road in the middle of nowhere and know all about me, but the health care system cannot do the same. Whose ass is being protected? Certainly not the patient's. Anyway i digress, but if you were that smart in figuring out how sick you were you would not need a doctor.

I Have Prostate Cancer

The odds of a man in a lifetime getting prostate cancer are about one in six. The incidence increases with age, and if you live long enough it is usually a matter of when not if you get prostate cancer if you are a man. I guess I have lived too long because I now have prostate cancer. I have had a radical prostectomy and will have follow up radiation treatment shortly which I am not looking forward to.

I am at a loss in the light of the fact this is the most common cancer in men and being so prevelent that the Ontario government does not pay for the screening test for this deadly disease. I guess men should be the strong silent type and shut up about this sensitive subject and die like a man. Men are about as likely to contract and die of prostate cancer as women are to contract and die of breast cancer. The irony of my situation seems to be that the is Breast Cancer month and I am bombarded with advertisements of pink products being sold, all a portion of sales going to breast cancer research. What about me, where is my "run for the cure"?

Santa Clause myth

I cannot fathom the insistence of parents to decieve their children about Santa Clause. Does this not in later life instil distrust of their parents when they find out Santa Clause is not ""real"" but only a invented figure. I am not suggesting no Santa at all but should be treated as other imaginary figures such as Mickey Mouse, Barbie and the Easter Bunny. ""Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus"" but he lives in the hearts of men (and children) and should not reach the status of a real magical human being.

Baby Abducted in Sudbury Hospital

Brenda Batisse, the woman who allegedly kidnapped a baby from the Sudbury hospital a few days ago, was defended by her aunt who insisted Batisse is "not a criminal".

Not a criminal? Of course she is a criminal, she commited (allegedly) a criminal act. I often wonder why we assume if a man commits a criminal act we assume he is a pig or a monster, while a woman is characterized as mentally unstable and needing help, a slave to her hormones, or under the influence of a man and therefore unable to think for themselves. Of course the man (common-law partner) was instantly arrested, but had to be released because he was not involved.

Proper security measures in the hospital might have prevented this occurence if they were followed. Just what we need, another incident to make parents paranoid about their children. In another news article a woman who was due to give birth in the same hospital was aprehensive about the security of the hospital (why I ask?). I would think after an event like this everyone would be security conscious. Besides I believe there has been only about three baby abductions in the last 15 years from Canadian hospitals making your child's chances of abduction approach zero.

Sibling Rivalry

While I can understand why my brother and sister might resent a rather large headed infant invading their comfortable world decades ago,and I might even forgive them for ganging up on me and teasing me about my head size, among other things,because we were all children at the time, you would think after all this time they could shed some of this baggage and treat me as an adult and accordingly some respect. As a child being bigger and older might have counted as being superior but being born first or before yourself no longer really has any import when one has reached adulthood, unless an accumulation of skills or wealth might infer some sort of superiority. Would a sit down and a long talk ameliorate this situation, I am not sure, as my opinions are already discounted? I wonder if I should console myself that other people have awful stories of destructive behaviours on the part of their siblings, while mine, though not close are at least civil.

Daylight Savings Time

Once again this time of year the whole North American continent with a few exceptions along with a lot of the world turn back their clocks. The original idea of twelve noon was that the sun was at its zenith and there was equal daylight in the forenoon as was in the afternoon. This probably worked well in an agrarian society. With industrialization came the need to have more natural light in the evening, thus came the idea of daylight savings time and each 6 months the clocks were dutifully turned forward and back. In our post agrarian, post industrial society we are finding that daylight savings time saves energy this the daylight savings portion of the year has been extended by several weeks each way so that daylight savings time occupies much more of the year than standard time.

What I propose is to eliminate the insanity of moving the clocks at all, advance them to daylight savings time and leave them all year long. Ask yourself if this constant moving the clocks serves any useful purpose and you will agree with me.