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“Flatly equal,” a system that confuses everyone’s right to enter the same queue with everyone receiving appropriate care.
As a business owner, mother, and avid rider, I spend my summers in Iceland riding up to 50 kilometres a day. This summer, I was afraid to touch my grandchildren for fear of passing on C. difficile.
These experiences feel embarrassingly personal. Other patients endure similar humiliation. Reliving them is painful, but silence leaves that suffering hidden.
I did not set out to debate health-care reform. I wanted to get well.
In July, I collapsed in my doctor’s parking lot with severe diverticulitis. After a week at Brampton Civic Hospital, I went home. Days later, paramedics arrived to find me passed out on my bathroom floor with C. difficile colitis.
A surgeon told me I needed immediate isolation and admission. There was nowhere to isolate me.
Instead, I sat among other patients for hours, and used a filthy public washroom. I wiped up my own waste and alerted a nurse that the bathroom needed cleaning. Twenty minutes later, nothing had changed.
On another desperate trip to the toilet, I lost control of my bowels, collapsed in the hallway, IV pulled out. Strangers stared.
I ended up on a stretcher in what felt like a closet, with a sink I could not reach. I begged for clean clothing, a commode and help. I was given garbage bags and told I could empty the commode myself.
As a health and safety officer, I understood the infection-control concerns. As a patient, I barely had the strength to protect myself, let alone anyone else.
I remained there for two days and one night because there were no beds upstairs.
Struggle to be heard
Other patients have shared similar stories: different illnesses, but an all too familiar struggle to be heard. The stakes can be life and death.
Seven years earlier, repeated ER visits for fever and severe pain ended with advice to take Tylenol and go home. On what I believe was my third ER visit, I insisted on a CT scan. It revealed an infected pseudoaneurysm on my femoral artery. A surgeon told me a rupture would have killed me.
I survived but never forgot fighting for the test that found it.
My C. difficile returned. At Headwaters Health Care in Orangeville, I was sent home despite saying I believed it had recurred. Within hours, I was back, and the diagnosis was confirmed. Later, I learned I also had Yersinia, another intestinal infection.
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No clarity
Searching for answers, I made two visits to Mount Sinai, where I saw an infectious-disease specialist. I was still experiencing C. difficile symptoms and what felt to me like a neurological breakdown. I left without the clarity I desperately needed.
Months of illness, fear and sleeplessness have left me struggling to think clearly and crying uncontrollably. My mental health has suffered. My GP placed me on an urgent psychiatry list. I was told the wait was one year.
The medication is not working as it should. The treatment needed is not available in Canada. Treatment abroad could cost tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. I am not wealthy. I am frightened, and I want my life back.
Not blaming doctors and nurses
I do not blame exhausted doctors and nurses working without enough staff, beds, or isolation rooms. I want governments to explain how they will provide those resources, improve follow-up, and ensure growing communities have the care they need. Announcing a hospital is not the same as opening a staffed bed.
We need honest discussion about carefully regulated private options alongside universal public care. Any alternative must add capacity and protect public staffing and access for people who cannot pay. Its benefit must be demonstrated, not assumed. But why should seeking treatment mean taking my savings out of Canada?
Fairness requires responding to medical need, noticing deterioration, and helping patients too sick to advocate for themselves.
This story is a rabbit hole: another infection, another referral, another unanswered question. I must stop writing, although living it has not stopped.
Universal care must mean timely, safe treatment. An equal place in a dangerous line is not enough.
– Gillianne Sture is a health and safety officer from Caledon, Ont.