This is legit a horror story, but not as scary as having a Swiftie daughter, now that’s just fucked up.
It all started in June 2020 when I was in the middle of exploring myself. Do what you will with that knowledge. I was in the middle of it when I felt some lumps. Now, I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen held quite a few in my mouth life to know when something’s not right. Mind you, this was 2020, so it was the middle of the pandemic, thus it was impossible to see a doctor. Wait, I’m doing Quebec a disservice here. It was already fucking impossible to see a doctor prior to the pandemic. Credit goes where credit is due.
I ended up using one of those virtual appointment services, and the doctor said that I indeed needed to get checked because that wasn’t normal at all. I mean, once again, I didn’t go to med school but I had already reached that conclusion myself. Great minds think alike, I guess. She told me I needed an ultrasound but there was such a huge ass backlog that the only appointment available was in six months from then.
“Uh, babes, I might have cancer, I don’t think it’s wise to wait that long.”
Sure enough, she told me I could either wait 6 months or go to a private clinic to get it done. I mean, money is not the issue, but the audacity of the fucking Quebec government to tax me like a motherfucker, while also making it virtually impossible to access the services they’re taxing me for. I was furious, but what else was I going to do? So I went to the private clinic the next day and got the study done.
Now, here’s where it starts getting interesting: Even though I paid dearly for that fucking study, I’m technically not the owner of that study, so I couldn’t see the results or get a copy for me to go to another private doctor and get them checked. They told me they would send it to my family doctor, but, like, I don’t have a family doctor. My only other option was to send it to the doctor from the virtual service and hope for the best. They were “nice” to me and gave me a summary of the results which I obviously did not understand because it contained 10 words, and half of them were numbers and the other half abbreviations.
Side note: I have been on the waiting list for a family doctor for 9 years now, and sure as hell I wasn’t going to get one during the pandemic.
The doctor called me and told me she had seen the study and she thought I really needed to see a specialist.
“OK, but do I have cancer?”
“Well, I don’t know, that’s why you need to see the specialist. Do you want to make an appointment?”
“Well, duh?”
So I heard her click click click, and then she told me that the waiting list for this specialty was 9 months, and that they would contact me once a doctor was available. Bitch, are you serious? Is this all I get? I was livid, but to be honest the pandemic was so awful, the curfew so ridiculous, and everyone riding François Legault’s dick so obnoxious that I low-key hoped I would die sooner than later anyway.
Fast forward to February 2024: There I was, still alive, and, to no one’s surprise, still unseen by any doctor, when I received a letter from the Quebec government asking me if I still wanted to see a specialist, and that I had 30 days to reply or they would remove me from the waitlist.
OK, OK, OK, we’re going to take a step back.
First of all: What was the point of that letter? Were they hoping I had died waiting or something or what did they expect me to reply?
Secondly: I literally received the letter on February 20th, and the letter was from February 3rd. So the 30-days window I had to reply to their bullshit notice was actually 10-days long only.
Finally: What the hell?
I called immediately and they told me I would have to wait another 4 months at least. Utter bullshit, through and through.
Fast forward to June 26th, literally four years after I first found the lumps in my balls and contacted the first doctor. I’m always on my phone except for that day when I left it upstairs while I had breakfast – that was as close as I’ll ever be to living off the grid. I saw a missed call from an unknown number, not news as I get spam calls every other day. Then I casually checked my email and, surprise! I had received an extremely aggressive email from Quebec’s healthcare system telling me that I was unreachable and that if I didn’t answer immediately, they would remove me from the waitlist and I would have to start the process all over again. I swear to God, they only called me once and they hit me with this? They’re mad that I couldn’t answer their call when I had been waiting FOUR YEARS for it? Jesus fucking Christ, this whole system is unbelievable.
“How much worse can this get?” I wondered. Well, I was about to find out.
I immediately called them and they told me I had an appointment for the following Friday, and if that wasn’t convenient then I had to wait until at least October. They didn’t give me much choice so I took it and emotionally prepared myself to get my ass to the other end of the country city. I’m exaggerating, it only took me 45 minutes to get there, but it was just the annoyance of it after all I had been through already. Anyway, I got there and I hit a car in the parking lot (whoopsies), so things were already getting exciting. So here’s where the really fucked up part begins (yes, this was all foreplay).
I got to the clinic, which is completely empty in the middle of a regular workday, and I’m obviously weirded out because clearly the place is empty, so why were they little bitches about my making the appointment at that specific date and time or else? The math wasn’t mathing at all. Finally after waiting a good 40 minutes – don’t ask me why because the place was literally empty – I heard my name through the speakers, telling me to go to room #10.
I got there, all the other rooms were empty too, and greeted the doctor with a perfect ‘Bonjour !’, he replied in English, which is an extremely important detail in this story. Another important detail is that I recognized his voice as the one who called my full name through the speaker. In a normal world, neither of these things should be important, but I had unknowingly stepped into The Twilight Zone and things were about to get fucked up.
He immediately went off telling me that he saw my studies and that he was surprised I looked fine because he had seen huge mysterious masses in my study, and asked me if I was in any pain at all. I obviously started freaking out the minute he told me that because what else can a mysterious mass be if not a fucking tumor? That coupled with how shocked he was at seeing me doing alright was not encouraging at all.
There I was, wondering how I would tell my parents I had cancer, afraid of asking how bad it was, if there were any next steps or just wait for it to kill me… Anyway, my mind was working extra hard trying to figure all that shit out. The doctor saw that and told me with the least reassuring voice that I shouldn’t worry just yet, that these masses could be anything, and that I needed to get a second ultrasound of my kidneys to see them better.
“My kidneys?” I snapped out of it in a heartbeat. “I never got an ultrasound of my kidneys.”
Now it was the doctor’s turn to be surprised. “What do you mean you didn’t get an ultrasound of your kidneys?”
“No, I got one of my balls.”
He looked at me in utter disbelief, then looked at his computer screen, then back at me, then back at me. “Wait, what’s your name?”
Uh, dude, didn’t you just call it 5 minutes ago? “It’s Mau.”
“You’re not Jean Tremblay***?!”
***Jean Tremblay is the most common name in Quebec, like, by far.
Bitch, you switched to English the minute you saw me even though my French is perfect because I don’t look like the stereotypical Quebecois. There’s no fucking way my name is that. “No?”
“Oh! You’re fine then, nothing to worry about!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re good!”
“How about Jean Tremblay?”
“Well, I shouldn’t be discussing patients’ diagnoses with others, but I guess I already told you most of it, so yeah, he’s got cancer 100%.”
I was ecstatic. Not about Jean Tremblay having cancer, but as I said before, there are about one million Jean Tremblays in Quebec, but there’s only one me, so if someone needed to have it, it better be Jean than me.
So then I asked the doctor about my own study and he said it was fine. I didn’t trust this bitch anymore so I asked him if he could check me. He didn’t want to but, girl, I had been waiting four years for this appointment to happen, there was literally no way I was leaving that place without being fondled. I pulled down my pants, he tickled a little bit here, squeezed a little bit there, and told me I was fine.
I then asked him about a term I had read in my study (back when they gave me that useless summary four years ago) and he said he would check it to make sure. Yet another plot twist: He didn’t have the study at all. I was dumbfounded. How the hell did he know I was fine before my forcing him to grope me, if he didn’t even have my fucking ultrasound on the system?
I legit googled the doctor before the appointment and I learned he was the board member and head of so many oncology and men’s health organizations, so I thought he was a professional, but all I had in front of me was the biggest fucking clown to have ever gone to med school. I wanted to kill him.
So he basically told me it was my fault for going to a private clinic because they cannot upload any studies to the public healthcare system. Well, well, well, so how the fuck was this my fault? I went private because there were no appointments, and then they wouldn’t give me the test results because the law says they can only send it to the doctors (public service). How is Quebec real, seriously?
He asked me the name of the private clinic and I told him I didn’t remember since I had been there four years ago. He looked at me in complete disbelief once again. “You waited four years to come see me?!”
Bitch, you’re preaching to the choir here. I told him I had been waitlisted for that long, not by choice.
“Oh, it’s pretty bad, eh?”
Really? You, the doctor who works at an empty clinic who somehow only has 15 minutes available for an appointment this month or else I have to wait until October, is telling me this right now? Like, didn’t he realize how he was part of the fucking problem?
So anyway, I found the summary in my emails. He read it, confirmed there were no callouts, and just told me to continue checking myself. I was honestly traumatized by this whole interaction.
To add insult to injury, two weeks later, I was going through the mail and received another notice from Quebec’s healthcare system telling me that since I had not answered their call before (the one I missed because I was having breakfast) I would be removed from the waitlist unless I called them within the next 15 days from the date of that notice. The letter’s date was from three weeks before, and I had only received it then so i was already effectively out of the waitlilst.
I am appalled at how this right-wing government’s priority is to protect the French language from an imaginary fiend, while real people are dying, waiting for a subpar healthcare system to take them in.
