By Trevor Greenway
Local Journalism Initiative
Kent Canavan’s mouth was filling with blood and he needed emergency help.
He had just had his wisdom teeth out and was bleeding profusely at his home in Low.
He rushed over to the CLSC to get some more bandages and have his wound looked at, but when he arrived, the doors were locked. It was lunchtime, and nobody came to help him, so he rushed back home to try to stop the bleeding.
“The door [to the CLSC] was locked, and I ended up going back to my apartment, and I ended up on the floor – I passed out,” said Canavan to the mayor, councillors and those gathered on March 14 during an emergency CLSC meeting in Low.
The meeting was called after residents were told that the town’s only medical clinic – the CLSC – would be reducing its hours to just one day a week, by appointment only. Close to a dozen seniors were present at the meeting, telling their personal stories and the fears they have about the potential cuts.
“The blood was coming out so bad at the time that, when I did come to, I grabbed a facecloth and rammed it into the crevices to slow down the bleeding,” added Canavan about his incident last year, before the impending reduction to one day a week. Now, he is worried that things will get even worse for patients in Low.
Fellow Low resident Debbie Cameron was in tears as she spoke about the constant support she needs from a home care nurse to look after her severely disabled son, who is a quadriplegic and suffers from dysphagia, spina bifida, diabetes and hydrocephalus. She said with the looming health cuts, in which $1.5 billion is being cut from healthcare in Quebec and $90 million in the Outaouais – home care services could be cut by 50 per cent, and she doesn’t know what she will do.
“He can’t even scratch his own nose, he can’t feed himself, he has difficulty speaking,” she said through sobs, as she described her son’s daily struggles. “I need support badly.”
Cameron said that her son’s home care nurse is “wonderful,” but she knows just how overworked she is. When Cameron’s 42-year-old son had an operation in Montreal last year, his home care nurse had to come every single day to drain the wound, and she said she worries how the cuts will affect her son’s quality of life. “They bend over backwards, but the time constraints – they are given too many people to look after, so they can’t do their jobs properly,” said Cameron.
Low Coun. Lee Angus was present at the meeting and said that councillors feel helpless in the fight for healthcare up the line, as residents have been faced with diminishing services for close to a decade. He said cutting services to just one day a week at the CLSC will have a detrimental effect on the region’s aging population.
“And you have to make an appointment when you want to go?” asked Angus. “So, you gotta plan when you’re going to be sick. It’s pretty pathetic to have a building there and nobody to man it and no services. I have been sick before and had to drive to Gracefield to get service, and that’s fine for me – I have a vehicle, I can do that – but there are lots of people who live around the village who don’t have vehicles and can’t get there.”
Low Mayor Carol Robert echoed some of Angus’ statements at the meeting, saying that her council feels a bit powerless in the fight for healthcare. She said that her council can put forth resolutions to try to pressure the province to make certain decisions, but ultimately Low doesn’t “have the power to change the health system.”
“The only thing we can do is put forth a really strong resolution, pinpointing all the points that were made here today and not only send it to all the other levels of the ministry but also the MRC, so that all the mayors support our resolution,” she said. “We’re not the only ones that are being hit – up north it’s the same thing, so they will support our resolution.”
Resident Colette Canavan, who has been an advocate for healthcare up the line, said at the meeting that the CLSC in Low will officially be reduced to one day a week, by appointment only, as of April 1. This has not been confirmed by CISSSO.
The cuts are part of the province’s austerity measures that will see $1.5 billion cut from the health sector by March 1.