Taking Umbrage - Again

Sometimes it seems as though this is what Canada and Canadians do best; bristle with indignation over the perceived - and too often real - belittlement we seem to suffer at the hands, mouths and apprehensions of our American 'cousins' to the south of us.
If it isn't taunting Canada for the diminished state of our armed services, it's taking pot shots at our universal health care system which, while delivering a fundamentally sound and reliable service, does have some flaws, in contrast to the U.S.'s lack of any universality of medical/hospital care leaving an immense population at risk.

There appears to be a debate ongoing in the U.S. about Canada's 'inferior' type of medical/hospital care, under our guaranteed universality. One that, it is claimed, seriously failed Natasha Richardson, in speedily verifying her condition, taking expert professional steps to ameliorate it, and in the process, save her life. The claim being that the Centre Hospitalier Laurentien in Ste-Agathe where the actor was initially treated for four hours lacked a CT brain scanner. The hospital does have that state-of-the-art equipment.

By the time the woman was admitted to their care too much time had elapsed to save her life. She was herself the unwitting architect of her own irreversible condition due to her initial refusal to have medical attention bestowed on her, or to be evacuated by ambulance for professional care. Her reaction to what appeared to be an insignificant fall on a beginner ski hill taking lessons from a ski instructor was not an unusual one, when people are embarrassed at having fallen and bringing unwanted attention to their clumsiness.

The lapse of critical hours post-fall when immediate medical care might have diagnosed the problem and intervention taken to ensure her condition did not deteriorate to the extent that it did, was the unfortunate culprit here. That she did not wear a ski helmet was another uninformed decision. The headline in the New York Post needling irritation within Canada's medical community: "Canadacare may have killed Natasha", is simply one additional vestige of traditional one-ups-manship.

One that the co-president of the Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice, Paul Saba, an emergency room doctor at Lachine Hospital, rejects outright, as 'completely unjustified'. But these tedious little spats of national conceit will continue to fray tempers between the two countries; they always have, always will. Yawn.