Alberta Healthcare experience #1

I had been having a sore throat off and on for a couple weeks along with some overall achiness. I needed advil daily and it seemed to do the trick. After the craziness of the first 2 days here, I crashed. And my throat was extremely sore along with my neck and upper back which usually means I have strep. Great, I needed to go to the doctor in a new country and I didn't have my Alberta healthcare card yet.

So Chris found this little medicenter and it was a walk-in, we called to make sure they'd see me and we headed out. When I got there the lady was pretty nice and said it would cost $150 since I didn't have an Alberta Healthcare number. Then when I gave her the credit card she asked me if I would like to process (with a long o) it when I got closer to seeing the doctor. I was confused. But then she explained that it was a lot of work for her if I was just going to leave the doctor's office. I said no, that I would be staying until I could see a doctor because I was not feeling well at all.

We waited awhile and every 5-10 minutes a "nurse" would come out and call names to come back. Each time she called 3-4 names before someone was actually sitting in the waiting room. Apparently people just got up and left if the wait was too long. Eventually I got called back and I sat in the room and waited for the doctor. It wasn't 2 minutes and the doc arrived. He first dissed the USA by saying that it was too loud there and politics was too big of a deal and then proceeded to take my blood pressure, look in my throat and listen to my lungs. That whole thing took 2 minutes. Then he said he would be right back with my prescription.

I thought maybe they had a different word for prescription or something because he hadn't even swabbed my throat or looked in my ears. 2 minutes later he walked back in, and handed me a sheet of paper with 2 prescriptions. One was some cough syrup with codine (I didn't tell him I had a cough) and the other was an antibiotic. I was very confused. How did he know I had strep?? So I said, "Do I have strep?" He responded with this, (in your best Indian voice) "Do you want me to swab your throat? Because it would take three days to find out if you had strep. You need to decide if you want to wait three days or if you want to take the pills?" So as crappy as I was feeling, I decided to take the pills. The pharmacy was attached to the medicenter (or medicentre if you want to spell it "right"). I waited 10 minutes and walked out with some cough syrup and an antibiotic that I've never heard of. And all the while I was thinking....no wonder we are becoming resistant to antibiotics!!!

Anyway...to make a long story short, I'm pretty sure I had strep because after 2 doses of the antibiotic I felt like a million bucks. Very very strange though and interesting that a test that normally takes less than 10 minutes in the US doctors offices could take 3 days in Canada. Just glad it was me and not the kids for our first doctor visit.