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I n the nearly 20 months since Oliver’s birth, we’ve taken him to the Hospital for Sick Children four times. I have no idea whether that’s above or below average, and in the throes of seeking medical attention, who would care? But yesterday, during our most recent foray there, I started thinking about our frequency because the process of arriving, taking a number and waiting interminably is beginning to feel all too familiar, and not in a good way.

Childhood illnesses, ranging from trivial to serious, are a constant presence or fear in every parent’s life. For new or first-time parents, each ailment is likely an alarm bell that sends us to consult books, friends, relatives, online resources and, if the timing of the illness co-operates, the family doctor. I’m sure, however, that the vast majority of problems arise or intensify in the middle of the night, on weekends, holidays, or other times outside a doctor’s office hours. So it often feels like our family doctor is a marginalized player when Oliver’s health seems the most vulnerable.

The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is a world-renowned facility dedicated to addressing the most serious childhood health issues. Whenever the hospital is in the news because a child has been transported there from a geographical location that cannot provide appropriate medical assistance or because doctors there perform a miraculous life-saving operation, I cheer them on as much as anyone. I am proud that such facilities exist in Toronto and are easily accessible to us.

In the emergency room, comparisons to a bus station come all too easily to mind.

Let me clarify that last statement. Sick Kids is geographically accessible to us, but once we arrive in the emergency/triage unit, comparisons to a bus station in a remote town come all too easily to mind. I am grateful that none of the issues that prompted us to take Oliver to Sick Kids has been, in the big scheme of things, imminently life-threatening and, I hope, knock on wood, never will be. But it is the absence of such drama that creates that wide gap between the excellence of a world-class facility and the ambience of a bus station.

Perhaps if we were living somewhere else, we would be truly grateful to have such a place. I can easily imagine other parents who might have to drive an hour or more to a regular hospital consider my statements to be huffy and trivial complaints. Rather than defend the validity of my description, I would hope that everyone of us could have appropriate medical facilities easily available when we need them. Because we live in Canada, such a hope has been bred into us as practical and achievable. And once upon a time, it wasn’t a hope, it was the norm. But with some exceptions, universal medical care accessible to all when it is required is but a fond memory to those who experienced it in the past. And it is this kind of nostalgia that precedes the frustration and sometimes the anger that arises when wait times and indifferent front-line workers stand in the way of finding out whether your child is okay or not.

Left-leaning politicians continually applaud our health-care system and tell us they’re fighting to protect it and save it from the right-wingers who point out that the cost of maintaining the system is debilitating and that we should consider introducing some form of private health. However commendable or valid their efforts, neither side really seems motivated to address the issue beyond posture and money. And I’m not going to fault the politicians entirely for their stance. I think a good part of the reason why they don’t go much beyond rhetoric is because we as voters tend not to press the issue far enough. Yesterday, we were surrounded by dozens and dozens of other families with a similar set of anxieties, what is wrong with my kid and why is this taking so long, and today I wonder how many, after getting the answer they sought and silently enduring the interminable wait, just wish to forget it all, chalk it up to an unfortunate isolated event, until the next time. Because by the time we get home with the hard-won prescription or cast or bandaged wounds, we just want to feed and bathe our babies, read some bedtime stories, tuck them into bed and then flake out ourselves. Who has the energy to push the issue any further?

F or the moment, I do. Yesterday, we happened to get very lucky in a way that in the ideal image of Canadian health care we shouldn’t have even had to consider. For years, we’d been sending our family doctor an annual cheque to cover potential extra costs, some of which I believe goes into a health network she joined. I vaguely recall being handed the papers to sign and being told that when her office is closed we can call the network. Until Oliver was born, such information was purely a formality, an insurance premium for the unlikely what-if. Oliver’s vomiting and fever yesterday occurred early enough for me to think it was possible to take him to our doctor’s office. Even though her secretary had left for the day, the recorded message provided a number that would page our doctor, so I figured she was probably still in her office. I left a message saying we were on our way, and our doctor soon called back saying she’d already left. She recommended that we take Oliver to Sick Kids, and if he hadn’t seen a doctor by 5 pm, we could call the network for information on the nighttime clinic.

When we arrived at Sick Kids, the number I pulled from the dispenser was third behind the current one being served. It was about 4:30, and it took about an hour and another vomit episode before we spoke to a nurse who duly filled out the paperwork, offered to administer some rectal Tylenol and reluctantly handed over some Pedialyte, a syringe and a kidney-shaped bowl. Anything further was beyond her domain and, clearly, her interest. I don’t really fault her for her attitude. Given the numbers, we might as all have been on an assembly line, we parents and kids with our various problems in one direction and the low-level nursing and admin staff with their documentation and limited authority in the other. The contact is so brief and superficial that it’s hardly necessary or expected to make eye contact. I don’t remember if the nurse wore a name tag and it certainly didn’t occur to me to ask her name, even out of a sense of propriety, and I’m sure moments after we moved from her desk she forgot ours because there was another family to deal with. So much information and yet just as much anonymity.

During our waiting period both before and after talking to the nurse, I conveyed similar information to the person who answered the phone for my doctor’s health network. There, too, was a certain level of anonymity, but one difference was the absence of weariness, or at least as much weariness. I’m sure this woman also felt taxed by people like me, but her bureaucracy is on a smaller scale. At the end of that phone call, she assured me that I would receive a message on my cellphone in about half an hour providing the time and location we could go to the nighttime clinic. Because cellphone use is forbidden in hospitals, I had used a payphone to call but left my own cell on vibrate so I would know when the message arrived and could go outside to retrieve it.

After dealing with the triage nurse, we were told to wait in another waiting room. Soon after, the message we wanted came and we were so out of there. Another family with whom we’d chatted with off and on over the previous two hours were curious about our departure. As I relayed our destination, I felt our circumstances were akin to winning the lottery in terms of emergency health care: we would be seeing a doctor in mere minutes while the people we were waiting with would have to hang on for at least an hour, possibly longer.

On the way over to the clinic, I said to Larry how glad I was that we’d been paying that annual fee. In political terms, we were effectively getting private health care. To the extent I know our doctor, I don’t think this is quite the philosophy she intended by joining the health network and it’s also not the way I choose to see it. Rather, I think it’s more of an indictment of the decline of the health system as we once knew it. But that may really be semantics, because the bottom line is that we are paying extra for something to get what we want faster.

I wish I could articulate my criticism without singling out Sick Kids, because I don’t think what I’ve described is particular to them; in fact, I think the most unfortunate aspect of this issue is that what I’ve described above is now the norm and is accepted that way. Our experience could have happened at any hospital and, according to conversations I've had with other parents, does. As I’ve also said, I know there are exceptions, and I’ve experienced excellent medical assistance, comprehensive, prompt, courteous, compassionate and informative. But for the most part, such experiences have been in the distant past, when doctors weren’t distracted by extra-billing caps, when nurses weren’t frustrated because they answer to their agency rather than the hospital they’re working in for that day, when other hospital workers wouldn’t refuse to help or answer a question because it conflicted with their job description or union policy, and when pharmacists wouldn’t pretend not to know the existence of another drug store just because they lacked the prescription you want. This isn’t about unfortunate isolated experiences. I know that, because seeing the faces of all the parents and even some of the kids in the waiting room, there was that dull feeling of déjà vu, along with that even worse feeling that any future experiences would be exactly the same. And when I exchange our experiences with other parents, there is such a common thread of familiarity.

How can I end this except on a flat dull note of frustration? I have no answers or even suggestions of the kind of crusade we voters, parents and sometime patients of the health care system. All I know is this: if our only options for health care in this country are public, universally accessible but woefully inefficient and private, profit-oriented but more efficient, we need to find some reasonable third path. More people need to talk about their experiences and their expectations in our health care system.