Canadian Wendy Sullivan’s Health Care Nightmare

By Lisa Farrar Wellman

Liberals love personal stories. On The Chosen One’s website readers can find sap story after sap story about health care woes. Visitors are encouraged to write in their own haunting tale to further the cause of Obamacare. While I don’t doubt that people need health care and certainly our system needs reform, the method of “reform” suggested by The Left sounds more like the makings of a personal rights nightmare than a dream come true.

A Smart Girl who knows a thing or two about health care nightmares, is Wendy Sullivan of Girl on the Right. Wendy is a Canadian who has not only lived with socialized medicine her whole life but who has also tasted the USA’s health system, too.  Her personal story follows. Share it with a liberal you know today.

SGN: You live in Canada. Why do you care what we do with our health care system in the USA?

WS: I care for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I don’t want to see a great country fall into the bureaucratic turmoil Canada lives in. The second more selfish reason is that if America’s standard of care drops, Canadians like me will have no place to go for urgent/critical/experimental treatment.

SGN: Have you ever sought medical treatment “south of the border?”

WS: I spent four months on a Kansas farm last year. I was only supposed to be there a month, so I only had a month’s worth of travel insurance. During the third month of my visit, I got sick. It was just a stupid infection, but I had to go to a clinic for a test and a prescription. We called in the morning, and I was seen in the afternoon by appointment. The cost was $150. While I was sitting in the waiting room, the receptionist came over to tell me the doctor was running about 10 minutes behind schedule, and she apologized. I nearly laughed in her face. Ten minutes? Ha!

SGN: Will you share with us one or two personal experiences with Canada’s health care system?

WS: My mother was suffering from a bad cough and a terrible pain in the shoulder area. She was 46 years old at the time, and a heavy smoker. The doctors at the first hospital she was admitted to (Lachine General in Montreal which is now closed due to lack of money) diagnosed her as suffering from pre-menopausal depression. My father, ever the skeptic, called his insurance company to arrange for a CT scan (legal in Quebec). He walked in to my mother’s doctor a few days later with the results of the imaging and said,  “You’d be depressed too if you had a tumor that big in your chest.” My mother died less than five months later, weighing just 43 pounds. It was the most horrific death I had ever seen, including in the horror movies I used to enjoy as a child. I was 14.

When I was 20, I was admitted to the Lakeshore General Hospital (Montreal) by ambulance. It was either the last day of October or the first of November. It was extremely cold where they left me on a cart by the ambulance bay, with the doors constantly opening to let in the wind and rain. They put me into that sexy, standard-issue butt gown and checked my clothes at the desk (I guess so they wouldn’t be stolen?). I was freezing, laying there without a blanket or pillow. Every time a nurse or orderly passed, I would beg for a blanket. I was so cold. They never brought me one. After about 5 hours, I noticed that the man on the next cot was dead. It was every man for himself, and I jumped up and stole his blanket. I grave robbed a man in a hospital emergency room just to keep from becoming the next casualty.

Think about that. How many people do you know wait five hours for medical care after arriving at a hospital via ambulance? In our messed up health care system, have you ever taken a blanket off a dead guy in order to stop shivering yourself? Yes, we have problems. Unfortunately H.R. 3200 neither addresses nor eliminates actual U.S. health care shortcomings. It does, however, land us squarely in Wendy Sullivan’s Canadian nightmare.

I will share the rest of my interview with Wendy Sullivan tomorrow.

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