Injection roulette

How private healthcare threatens patient outcomes and patient sanity

Photo grabbed from Reddit’s Mildly Interesting subreddit. Yes, it’s mildly interesting that this needle is so goddamned big.

Every month, I need to have an injection. The subcutaneous vessel contains something that keeps me in menopause. My cancer is fed by hormones, and so this cuts the tumour’s lifesource. The injection hurts, the menopause sucks and the logistics of finding a place to do it on the same day of each month is a pain in my ass (stomach).

This morning, I went for my appointment (scheduled at the start of July). When I’m home, I get the injection at my local pharmacy (owned by Métro, who made $1 billion in profits in 2025). When I arrived at the desk, I was told that my appointment was cancelled — the nurse had quit.

They told me that they called me several times to tell me this: on July 26, on July 27 and again, on July 28. They couldn’t reach me and here I was, shit out of luck. That’s what you get when your healthcare is coordinated by the private system. If a nurse quits, you don’t get to just see another nurse — there’s no one else. Try clicsanté was the advice. As if I hadn’t thought of the most obvious option.

We used to have a local vaccine clinic in our neighbourhood that was public. That’s gone, replaced by corporations who pay profits to shareholders from the two minutes it takes to give me this implant.

Now, I have to walk for 20 minutes down and back up the cliff to my closest public clinic, if I can get an appointment. As they’ve removed vaccine services from our neighbourhoods, central locations are far busier, and private pharmacies have gobbled up patients like me, charging us a modest fee of $20-$30 to have the injections. That’s nothing, compared to the $200 my medicine costs (post insurance claim).

Thanks to my geriatric neighbourhood, we are overflowing with pharmacies. But it’s not that straightforward: one refuses to do any injection for medication that isn’t filled by them. One has a confusing operation I’ve never been able to successfully navigate. When my pharmacy hired a nurse, it was like hitting the lottery. I didn’t have to walk far and I could order medicine and shot together.

Except when the nurse quits. They’re not mandated to have a backup nurse or to find me a solution.

The trouble though really started six years ago, when my phone company Vidéotron (Owned by Québecor, net profits of $1.4 billion in 2025) divided my phone and internet bills so I had to pay them separately. They didn’t tell me this, and so by midway through 2020, when I was thinking about a million things that weren’t related to my cell phone billing, they cut my cell phone service. I had been paying my bills to one of the two accounts — surplus in my Internet account and deficit in my cell phone account.

They split the accounts so that it was harder for users to see gradual fee increases. And, it was easier to miss payments and charge people interest. Since 2020, it’s happened several more times. My bank’s interface shows that I pay two separate accounts, but sometimes it’s actually still both to Internet. I even set up automatic billing in what I thought was the troublesome account to stop this from happening again.

Rather than calling me to say that one of my accounts had all my money and one of my accounts was in the red, Vidéotron cut my cell phone service. I don’t know when, because I haven’t called anyone since Sunday. My cell phone, for all intents and purposes (photos, Internet, instant messaging, texting) worked fine. When Sandy called me yesterday to record this week’s episode, she told me she couldn’t reach me (weird!) That’s when I discovered that Vidéotron cut me off again.

I looked at my bank account: two payments, both made in July, to different accounts.

When I called, the agent said he could see that there was too much money in one account and not enough money in the other. No, he couldn’t switch them — I had to pay the outstanding balance again and just ride out a credit in my other account. I had been asking for years if they could combine them again finally. Sure, was the surprise reply (after years of no). Just call back next week — it can’t happen while your account is in deficit (yes, don’t think too hard about how my problems vanish if the accounts were combined because all the money I “owed” was also “owed” to me by Vidéotron in the form of a credit).

So — no cell phone, no phone call warning, no call from the pharmacy and I arrive this morning and no injection.

I ran to two other pharmacies and the second one could take me in 45 minutes. Relief. $20 and I’m good for another four weeks.

In May, all the mainstream pharmacies that I called in Regina told me they couldn’t give me an injection. Shoppers Drug Mart (Loblaw’s 2025 profits were $2.6 billion), which was the closest pharmacy to where I was staying, told me they didn’t do injections for business travellers like me. Maybe I should try the street clinic, they suggested. I did, and not only was the nurse the most talented injectress I’ve ever had, they charged me nothing (The pharmacy owner isn’t in this business to make money she said.)

My June injection happened when I was home for vacation. No pharmacies did the kind of injection I needed, so I booked with a walk-in clinic months in advance. At the desk, I was told I had to pay $100 in motherfucking cash. She didn’t know why this wasn’t mentioned when I booked the appointment. What choice did I have? I had the money, thanks to the corner store down the way having the cash on hand. The cashier only charged me $102. I could either pay, or not have the injection at all.

Private medicine is convenient and easy right up until the point where it’s not. It works until the non-unionized nurse quits and they have no requirement to replace her. It works until you have a job that doesn’t let you take all the time you need to figure this stuff out. It works until you can’t run from pharmacy to pharmacy to find another option the day you need the injection. It works until you can’t afford the expense.

It works, until you cross from one province into another province and your monthly vaccine becomes availability and cost Roulette.

It works until it doesn’t.

Sometimes the public system doesn’t work either, except there is a major difference: the private system offers healthcare services as an ancillary service to its main reason to exist: to make profits. No public clinic would turn someone away because a nurse had quit. They are a clinic in the business of serving people, first and foremost. The Shoppers Drug Marts, Pharmaprixes, Brunets and Jean Coutus of the world are, first and foremost, in the service of sending our money to their shareholders. If they provide a service along the way, great.

It feels necessary to mention that all of this is because I decided that I should not allow cancer to grow tumours so large that I would die a slow and painful death. While I may still die that way, I’d like to prolong it from happening. But the barriers, the fees, the running-around — it stops lots of people from filling their prescriptions, following their doctors’ orders, seeking care. It stops lots of people from the luxury of prolonging a good life. All the while, it pays money out to shareholders.

And worse, it conspires with other forms of control and discipline to grind us into the ground. I never asked for my cell phone to be an extension of myself — that all things are to be done through it. I guess, at least this time no one called the police to file a missing persons report about me, like when I left my phone at the Vancouver airport while flying to Whitehorse and my hotel couldn’t reach me for a few days last September.

Canada’s beloved public healthcare system has been in a state of garage sale for decades now. If you look at the work of CCPA Senior Health Policy Researcher Andrew Longhurst, you can see the impact that this garage sale has had on our provincial systems. We can joke about Canada being a couple of [insert companies here] in a trench coat all we’d like, but christ, no one is coming to save us from this system. It has to be shut down.