After reading Chrissie Blatchy’s latest scrawlings, just when I think she can’t get any nastier or more insane, she does!
It’s why, where I used to think that before I got really old I’d get me a gun so I could shoot myself, I now wonder if I won’t instead turn the weapon on some officious hospital executive, wanker bureaucrat or brute of a nurse.
Wow! Now she wants to shoot some nurses and some other hospital workers, along the way it would seem.
Toronto health care workers, you’ve been warned. You see an old, crazed, bug-eyed hag, with ill-fitting glasses and a haircut that looked like it was done by a place called Mutt Cuts, be sure to drop whatever it is you’re doing to serve her. Never mind that heart-attack patient you’re all trying to revive or that trauma patient you’re trying to stablize. If Chrissie comes a chargin’ in, she takes precedence. She made that clear in her screed too:
…when my old and ailing mother was being given the run-around and the local Community Care Access Centre (another oxymoronic name) was determined to send her as far away from where I live as possible.
I phoned the then-Ontario health minister and baldly pulled in a favour. She was sent to a closer place, so I could see her every day, and shortly afterwards, had the good sense to die.
See? She had connections and used them to bump her mom up some list to get into a long term care facility near her home. Not like Mama Blatchford didn’t already have somewhere to go, that place was just too far for Chrissie’s liking.
It begs the question, what poor senior was bumped down that list to accommodate Mama Blatchford? A senior, who perhaps, unlike Chrissie’s mother, had no other place to go? If anything, acts like Chrissie’s calling in a favour from the Ontario Health Minister at the time to bump her mother up that list so Chrissie wouldn’t have to drive a few extra kilometers to visit her, is one problem with the health care system. Yeah, Chrissie, you contributed to that one!
As for Doreen Wallace, who fell on the floor of a Niagara Hospital, well, Chrissie jumped her guns for that one too:
82-year-old Doreen Wallace, who this month was leaving a Niagara Falls hospital where she was at her dying husband’s bedside, when she fell in the lobby and was left there, with what turned out to be a broken hip, face-down on the floor because 911 had to be called and an ambulance dispatched.
Well, as usual, Chrissie didn’t do her job as a responsible journalist should, and actually try to find out why, rather than go all nuts. TorontoEmerg, a veteran Toronto ER nurse and once a contributor here, explains why Ms Doreen Wallace would’ve been left on the floor.
Funny thing, this happens fairly often, and it’s a bit more complicated than you might think. Elderly hospital visitor falls down, goes boom. Someone says, “Let’s call those all-competent emerg nurses, they’ll know what to do,” ED nurse arrives, and the first thing she thinks about is c-spine protection as part of the ABCs. The point is, you just can’t simply move a patient who has fallen from standing height without protecting their neck. Especially elderly women, whose bones tend to break like eggshells. The result from moving a patient precipitously could be catastrophic if they have a cervical spine fracture. Patients in these situations need to be immobilized, which requires special training and equipment
TorontoEmerg goes on to explain that more often than not, if there is no qualified personel or equipment to handle a potential c-spine problem, it’s best to call the paramedics who a) trained to handle this injury and b) have such equipment like spinal boards and other goodies to completely immobilize a patient before anyone could think of moving them.
Boy, Chrissie, it really does suck to get all the facts, don’t it? Perhaps a responsible journalist would’ve found a health care professional to speak with before going off half baked as it suits them, or the propoganda they’re attempting to push for their masters.
That is the sad thing these days, innit? Right winged media types all sounding the cry for American health care in Canada because our universal system just don’t work. They always find somebody had a rought time of it, or some patient who had some problem, because of x, y or z, but they never seem to actually try to get all the facts involved with that particular story; talk to a health care professional. Talk to whomever. Actually take the time to study some data and research some fun sciencey facts before going off on that “Torpedo universal heath care cry!”
Oh, and TorontoEmerg has offered a challenge to ol’ Chrissie, it would appear:
I am willing to have her shadow me for a day in my emerg, under two conditions: first, she works the entire 12 hour shift, and second, she sits when I sit. Seriously, Christie, email me.
TorontoEmerg, I seriously doubt that Chrissie has the wherewithall to rise to your challenge, however, it’s out there now, you’ll have to let us know if she does email you, by some miracle. If she actually does show up at your ER, make sure hospital security ensures that she’s not armed. This also means that Chrissie Blatchford should perhaps put up or shut up when it comes to our universal health care system, more specifically, when she bitches about front line health care provides, like nurses.
That’s Chrissie, moving up from (paraphrased) “you can’t have a proper war without torture” , to shooting nurses.
There is one great big way the health care system is failing ol’ Chrissie–they never seem to quite find the right psychotropic cocktail mix for her. One only needs to read her columns to notice this.