Halloween, Pie Making, and Healthcare

This week on PEI, it is beginning to look a little frosty. The temperatures in the early morning hover around freezing, but warm up to the fifties in the afternoon. Still, the sun comes up later each day and sets earlier. Halloween is this weekend. Since the houses and farms are so far apart, I don't really know what Trick or Treating will be like. Whatever it is, the kids will be working for the candy! It is definitely not like Lowell where you can walk to 200 houses in an hour!

I have been invited by my neighbors to make pies at the community center (a former one room schoolhouse) for a community fundraiser. People are very nice and welcoming here. Getting around to the healthcare debate, I find it kind of funny that there are a number of fundraisers like bake sales and craft fairs to raise money to buy equipment for the hospital. Recently, someone held a fundraiser to buy a piece of equipment for the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) at the hospital. Usually, a couple thousand dollars are raised, and it is a newsworthy event. In Massachusetts, hospitals raise funds by tapping millionaires and having glorious galas to raise hundred of thousands of dollars. Healthcare here is not the finest in the world, Canadian public opinion nothwithstanding. Canadians are terrified of American health care. They are convinced the poor and elderly get no health care at all. This is ironic, since the poor and the elderly are the only ones who do get healthcare without having to pay for it!

Healthcare here is humble but sturdy. The hospitals have very little new equipment and share resources. Carts have broken wheels. Doctors sit on stools that have been repainted a little too often. The surfaces are a little shabby and could use new paint. This contrasts with the luxurious settings of US hospitals with the best and newest equipment money can buy.

Nursing care is very different here. When you are admitted to the hospital, they keep you until you are well enough to go home. Abby was in the hospital for three days for an ear infection, treated with IV antibotics. No CAT scan, no sophisticated tests. Just a wait and see attitude and low-tech antibiotics until she was better and could go home. Contrast my major abdominal surgery three years ago. I was operated on at 4 pm and sent home in a haze of anesthetic at 7 pm once I could stand up in the recovery room. The surgery was robot-assisted laparoscopy. A follow up office visit a week later. A very different approach to health care. I think Canadian health care does the best it can with very limited resources. I think American health care could do much better in that regard.