Thread by @Emer_OToole

Here’s what it’s like when your kids get sick in Québec right now – a long thread.

First, there’s no over the counter painkillers or fever relief on the pharmacy shelves. When my kids came down with daycare lurgies two weeks ago, the pharmacist made me up bottles of adult meds with instructions on how to cut the pills, crush them, & mix them with apple sauce.

Have you ever tried to make a 1-year-old with gastro eat a spoon of weird tasting gritty fruit compote in the middle of the night? And when they can’t keep meds down, there’s no suppositories – so you can’t make them comfortable.

Second, there’s no ER. My eldest got better & went back to daycare. My baby didn't. He has asthma. He’d been running a fever for 5 days when I recognized the signs of respiratory distress - the rice krispie crackle of his lungs, the sucking skin at his neck and under his ribs.

You don't want to fuck around with that shit, so I took him to the Montréal Children's Hospital ER. I told the nurse at ‘pre-triage’ or reception about the asthma, the breathing, the fever. The pre-triage nurse performed a brief visual exam - i.e. - she looked at him.

I was told to take a seat in the waiting room until called by registration. (Not even triage. Registration. Just to get a place in the queue for triage. Which in turn just puts you in the queue for a doctor.) The waiting room was mobbed. There were no seats.

Parents were sitting on the ground with their sick kids in their arms. A woman rearranged her family, sitting a kid on his Dad, to make a space for me. There were very ill children in that room, all crammed in on top of each other, coughing, puking, crying, moaning.

ERs obviously don’t work on a first come first served basis, for good reason, but it was still crazy how many people who arrived at the ER after me were called to registration before me. Evidentially, the pre-triage nurse with her 15 second eye flick knew something that I didn’t.

An hour & a half later I was still waiting to be called to registration. Then there was an announcement scolding parents for asking staff about wait times and announcing that the average wait time for all but the sickest children was 20 hours from time of registration.

Seeing as we hadn’t yet been registered and an entire fucking day in a small hot room full of the baddest microbes known to babykind did not sound ideal, I went home with my sick kid.

We managed to get an emergency appointment at my CLSC (health clinic) the next afternoon. We’re fortunate we have that option – it’s only available to us because we have a family doctor.

The doctor at the clinic said the baby probably had some nasty virus. He wrote us a referral to a semi-private clinic for a chest X-ray and said that if things got worse we’d just have to take the baby back to emergency, because the tests the clinic could do were limited.

Things did get worse. The baby alternated between flopping and crying. This time, I did my homework. I found the Montreal ER with the most capacity - Jean Talon Hospital. I called first to ask if they took children. In a pinch, they did.

This time, I got through registration and triage. Then I sat in a corridor with my baby for 5 hours. It did not seem crazy busy, but the rate at which patients were called were excruciatingly slow. It seemed as though only two examination rooms were in use.

A break to tend to sick baby. TBC!

Okay. After midnight, after 5 hours looking at the same faces, most of whom had been there longer than us, I gathered up my sick kid & went home. Maybe I should've stuck it out longer, maybe we would've been seen eventually, but it didn't look that way & we were both exhausted.

Back home, my baby’s fever burned at over 40. I upped his asthma meds without supervision, trying to calm his breathing. The next day I cancelled all my work appointments. The little guy would not let me put him down. He is usually a chill, sunny dude, but he cried and cried.

I brought him for the chest X-ray (which he screamed his way through). Then I called my clinic and asked the receptionist to prompt the emergency clinic doctor to look at the scan. He called me 5 minutes later – my baby had pneumonia.

First, no over-the-counter kids’ painkillers or fever relievers; Second, no emergency medicine; and Third – yup, there’s a third – no antibiotics.

The clinic doctor send a prescription to my pharmacy and was very clear in telling me that I needed to start the antibiotics ASAP.

Then the pharmacy called to tell me that there’s a rupture in stock for kids antibiotics throughout Quebec. They were just going to send a request back to the doctor asking if he could prescribe an alternative.
Would an alternative be efficacious? The pharmacy guy didn’t know.

How long would the process of requesting an alternative prescription from the doctor take? Was it going to happen right now? "Eh, no, it’s not immediate – we have to get in touch with them, they have to get back to us…"

“This is crazy,” I said. The pharmacy guy did not like that. “You wanna try get this antibiotic at some other pharmacy?” he sneered in a tone one might use for a teenage wiseass demanding to be sold vodka, not the parent of a small child who needs antibiotics so he can breathe.

I hung up & called my clinic, asking reception to communicate the situation to the doctor. Through all this, my baby suckered his hot little face to my boobs like a limpet, his breath crackly and awful, and I thanked fuck I had failed in all my previous attempts to wean him.

A woman from the pharmacy called back, chosen for the task presumably because she was capable of exhibiting human empathy. She'd found a pharmacy that had the ingredients to make us up the meds. It was in Youville – a 20 minute drive away. My partner grabbed a communauto.

My baby is on antibiotics now, and – fingers crossed, touch wood – he seems to be on the mend. So we’re lucky. Not everyone is going to be this lucky. Not everyone has a family doctor and attendant clinic. Not everyone has understanding work situations.

If this madness continues, children are going to die here this winter. I believe that.

My asthmatic 1-year-old had pneumonia and couldn't breathe properly, and we still couldn't get seen.

I am amazed at how fully the media here seems to be swallowing the line that all of this is due to an uptick in children’s respiratory illness. That’s a contributing factor, sure, but it is not the real story.

There are too few doctors, and instead of incentivizing more, the government is torturing the ones we have.
montreal.ctvnews.ca/legault-threat…

There are too few nurses, and this kind of shit is happening
globalnews.ca/news/9278800/q…

Quebec deserves better reporting on the structural problems that have caused this major failure of essential social infrastructure, this fucking disaster waiting to happen.

And me - after this long twitter rant, I deserve some sleep.

https://twitter.com/Emer_OToole/status/1596714436827369472