The Great White North has provided me with a variety of exciting experiences, including but not limited to: trying poutine for the first time, being yelled at by border patrol for parking inches ahead of the stop sign, learning some of the Canadian dialect, and of course, turning 19. Sorry mom.
What I hadn’t planned to experience, however, was spending my Friday partying it up with the Canadian healthcare providers in the local emergency room — let alone two of them. But then again, I always thought life was meaningless until you made it exciting.
Was the excruciating pain in my side exciting? No. Although, it did send shocking bolts of electricity up my spine and I suppose beggars can’t be choosers.
After discovering a clinic couldn’t see me for another nine days, I found myself being escorted to Fredericton’s Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital with a posse of worried friends, only to be greeted by a lady with her head in a bucket. Her retching sounds were bouncing off the crowds of people sitting in misery.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I thought.
This was where I wondered, would it be more beneficial to keel over and die than to stay another second in this hell-hole? Where could I find the nearest bus to the border and is this where my international student journey ends? Never in my life had I appreciated the Maine healthcare system as much as I did at that moment.
I was ushered towards the front window, thinking I’d be asked my name and the severity of my case.
Instead, I was told to take a number as if I was waiting for some cheese slices at the deli and then directed to sit like a pig waiting to be slaughtered.
When the triage nurse left me with a skip in her step, I found myself with one remaining friend, walking down an aisle covered in bloody tissues and people groaning in pain.
With the number 154 gripped in my clammy hand, I sat on a bench and stared at the red, flashing No. 46 on the screen taunting me.
Sitting in the most uncomfortable seat known to man with the pain in my side persisting and a headache forming around my eyes, I wondered where on earth all that 15 per cent provincial sales tax was going — because it certainly wasn’t the hospitals.
After an hour of waiting, the hallways continued to fill with patients in a variety of conditions and my pain only festered and fumed; I decided to bail. Flying down the highway to the Oromocto Public Hospital, I clutched a sandwich in my fingers and my last remaining will to live clung to my neck like a WWE smackdown chokehold.
After a mere six hours, I was blindly following the only doctor in the building to a sticky chair squished in a long, narrow hallway reminiscent of The Shining. However, I didn’t have much time to start swinging an axe at the bathroom doors. Instead, I was suddenly attacked by a syringe holding a bright blue liquid and suddenly I was a test subject in a horrific sci-fi drama written by my appendix.
Without warning or an explanation, I was stabbed — and it stuck. It hung out of my arm like a candle in a birthday cake and stayed there for a good 30 seconds too long.
Then it was gone. So was the serpent alien that wielded it.
With that, my first time in a Canadian ER was over without so much as a goodbye. With my invalid American health care card, I was shoved out into the cold Canadian winter with a dull pain in my side, and my aforementioned will to live crunching under my American shoes. Fortunately, it wasn’t appendicitis as I had feared.
Next time, and I hope to all that is holy there won’t be a next time, I’ll be calling myself an Uber and racing down Route 1 to Maine Medical Center with the promise of a bill larger than the L.L. Bean Boot car and a comfortably sterile chair.
