Of Sinus and Cire

I have had a painful two weeks, quite literally. In fact, I hardly remember anything of last week. This post will be less an essay with my observations on Canada and more a rumination on living abroad and the difficulties which come with that.

Our scene opens on night, just before Canadian Thanksgiving, a Thursday. The setting is a quiet apartment in the working class neighborhood of Verdun, far outside the shadows of Mount Royal. The light rain patters against the front bedroom’s window, and the radiator is not on to fight the creeping chill.

It was on this night, I believe (because things start to get blurry around this time), that my story starts. As some of you may know, I work at a company which manufactures earplugs for hearing protection, hearing aids, and high end earbuds (for the iPods of the world). Being in this environment, it was sooner rather than later that someone stuck a probe in my ear and discovered, surprisingly, that I have a lot of earwax. So, I purchased an over-the-counter treatment to fix this problem and administered it after returning home from work. It all went smoothly for an hour.

And then the pain started.

The pain started in my left ear, as a slight ear ache. It radiated out into my jaw and, as the hours rolled slowly by, the pain increased until I could not keep my left eye open. Eventually, after about four hours of failed sleep, the pain began to ease. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought to myself, “That sucked, but at least it’s over.” My last thought that night was that having a little earwax never hurt anyone.

The ear is not externally connected to the sinuses. Nor is the left ear connected to the right sinus. So, I am sure that what happened on that Thursday before Thanksgiving (what a weird country in which I live) had nothing to do with what happened the next week. A strange coincidence, at the most. Rather, and I am supported in this opinion by a number of medical professionals, my cold which I mentioned two weeks ago in my non-post and had not been able to shake, turned into a sinus infection. Still, the proximity of the earwax treatment’s mystery pain and the incredible mind-numbing pain (and I am not one to use that term lightly) of the next week’s sinus infection feel somehow connected.

So, whether you want to say that the story continues on Saturday night, or that it all started then, is up to you.

Either way, I met up with some friends to celebrate Thanksgiving. We were a Scot, two Americans, and a Canadian who does not celebrate the holiday at home. We ate chicken - delicious chicken the size of a small turkey, but a chicken nonetheless). It was a great night which devolved at one point into a somewhat drunken intellectual orgy on cosmology and quantum physics. Surprisingly, I had nothing to do with that. I only participated after it became clear the war was lost and the conversation would continue whether I sat there silently or not. Eventually, we realized the last metro was running in 10 minutes, so the Canadian and I set out to beat it to the station in full merriment. Ho!

And then the pain started.

So, you tell me, does the story continue, or has it all started again? I believe Kundera would call this the mad myth of eternal return. Certainly, its inanity is annoying, if not irreparable.

As I said, the pain started. It radiated out from my right ear, but was much more forward, running along my cheek bone, before descending through my rear molars. They tingled in their numbness, and yet still hurt with the lightest of touches. It was an odd sensation, none too pleasant, but I figured it would go away. Mostly, I figured it was just my other ear having a delayed reaction to having its earwax so unjustly emulsified and drained out.

Sunday, I felt horrible, just tired, lethargic even. I did get around to seeing Coco avant Chanel, but Monday dawned much too soon and I spent my precious day off being truly lethargic. The pain had continued, and was now starting to get worse. This, by the way, is not a story about pain, but pain is central to the story. If you have not figured it out by now, I was in a lot of pain by Tuesday, and I was even more tired, since I could not fall asleep the night before from that pain which I just recently assured you this story is not about.

I ended up going in a good hour and a half late. It is an interesting feature of being in the early throes of a painful illness - and this same thing happened in the months after my back injury - but the realization that one is in pain does not necessarily translate to an awareness that one’s normal functions are impaired by that pain. Which is all to say that I felt horrendously bad about coming in late, as though I had somehow done something wrong, even though I had been lying in my bed at 3 am, five hours after turning out the light, grinding my teeth together in a vain attempt to calm down the throbbing pain in my right cheek.

Luckily, as I sheepishly walked into my boss’ office, my first question was, “How do you go to a doctor in Canada?” And this, if not at least twice before, is where this story starts.

Canada, we all know all too well, is a socialist country with socialist medicine. And I am not covered by that socialist medicine. I have an arcane foreign healthcare policy, which requires mailing in forms through the mail! And I was not sure if I could just go to a doctor’s office and make an appointment, or if I had to find some special place that accepted degenerate Americans. And, although I did not realize it at the time, my ability to function as a normal member of human society was quickly degrading. (One of the founders of the company, upon seeing me yesterday, said, “Welcome back. I don’t want to insult you, but you were a sack of **** last week.”)

As best I understand it, a sick person without a regular physician and Medicare coverage has two options: the first is to go to a walk-in clinic; the second is to find a private doctor willing to take on a new patient. In both cases, the charges are to be paid up front. So, figuring that any competent doctor would be able to help me, and not yet being in truly terrible shape, I opted to get up early and go to the cheaper walk-in clinic on Wednesday morning.

And that is what I would have done, if I had been able to sleep that night.

It was even worse than the night before. I spent a good two hours of that night seriously thinking about using my paycheck (I got paid on Thursday last week) to pack it in and go home. By the time Wednesday dawned, I had not slept soundly in two nights, the pain was as acute as, well, it definitely ranked with the worst pain I have ever experienced. The pain was to the level of disrupting my every conscious moment, and preventing sleep, and that is a very bad place to be in when trying to get up early to go to a clinic in a foreign country, knowing I will have to pay out of pocket after waiting for three hours just to see a doctor for five minutes who promptly said that the pain was not in my sinuses or my ears, but that I had a tooth abscess.

Despite not a single visible sign in my mouth of any problem, he declared it a tooth abscess.

Despite having had a cold for two weeks, he declared it a tooth abscess.

He prescribed me an antibiotic (clindamycin). I asked him if I should see a dentist, and the incompetent doc said the thing which probably saved me from a week of pain. He said, “No, no need to see a dentist. Just take this prescription, and if my diagnosis is correct, you should feel better before a week.”

Why hadn’t he told me he was incompetent when I walked in?

Needless to say, I went to the office, which was my only link to people who knew how to find English-language medical care, and told my boss that I needed to go to a dentist. By this time, it was too late to call for an appointment that day, but we agreed that as soon as I came in the Thursday morning, he would call his dentist, who was accepting patients, and send me over there. And that is what happened.

Really.

What a great dentist! He took x-rays, tapped on my teeth a bunch (to find which one it was that hurt), talked to me about how bad O’Hare is (yeah, I know, I’ve been hearing that since England in ’05), and then said that it was nothing dental. In no way was my pain being caused by a dental problem, but that a simple evaluation had shown him that my sinuses were hurting and that clindamycin was not the antibiotic to be used for the treatment of that. And then he only charged me for the x-rays. Seriously, he was a great guy, and I owe a debt of gratitude to him for seeing me on less than an hour’s notice and for giving better medical advice than the doctor the previous day. If you ever need a dentist in Montreal, I can highly recommend Dr. Peter Weinstein at Côte-des-Neiges and Queen-Mary.

So, it was back to the office, which at this point I was only returning to for help in getting treated, since Tuesday was the last day that I could really do any work. This is where my story enters this strange, bizarre world that can only come from working for rich Jews. I am not making this up. No one else in the world would give me the advice that came next.

Adam, the aforementioned founder of the company, came up to me and said he knew a private doctor who “took cash.” The man had saved the life of Adam’s brother, had once headed the ER of Montreal’s largest French hospital before getting tired of the life, which evidently included his wife, who Adam told gleefully told me the good doctor had left for a hot young thing who now carted him around. Because, behold the insanity, this doctor only makes house calls. And when I say he “takes cash,” I mean that only takes cash.

I will withhold his name, because people like him are not the sort of people that need publicity or their good works rewarded in overly long and effusive essays posted on public blogging sites.

I called his number and was informed that the doctor would be around my office between 11 am and 3 on Friday, and that the doctor accepted cash for the consultation fee, which was not an insignificant sum.

He arrived in stately glory, a worn medical bag at his side, and the reassuring look of a French country intellectual (think Michael Lonsdale). I told him my problem, through gritted teeth and wiping my eye of tears, and he listened. Which is what the dentist had done. Which is not what the free clinician had done. But, unlike the dentist’s, there was no sense of urgency, no sense that there were other patients to be seen. So, we sat in the boardroom and he listened, and then we chatted a bit, and he asked a few more questions, and we joked around. And, it was, dare I say, luxurious?

I told him that the doctor at the free clinic had misdiagnosed me, and he said that usually happens.

I told him the dentist had given me a better medical consultation than the doctor, and he laughed. I do not know why he laughed, since it was not funny but simply a sad statement of fact, but he laughed. And I relaxed.

I told him I was on clindamycin from the clinic, and he looked befuddled. But, quickly, understanding came to him, and then he looked both amused and professionally insulted. “Oh,” he said despairingly under his breath, “for an abscess.”

He checked me for mono and a quick check for meningitis. He looked in my mouth and my ears, and he listened to my lungs. All of which, I would like to add, Dr. G. A. Thon of the Vendôme walk-in clinic had not done. Finally, he diagnosed me with a sinus infection and joked about him giving me a shot of vancomycin (which was hilarious at the time).

And he wrote me a prescription for Biaxin, and at this point I did not care that I was taking my second antibiotic in two days, because, you see, luxury relaxes tensions and, as I hinted above, this visit was luxurious and I was now relaxed. I looked back and realized how tense I had been since Saturday and that was all gone now. I knew I would take the pills and then I would be well. And that is exactly what happened.

After I paid him 150$ in cash.