COVID Challenges – Louise

 

Louise relocated to a new city and could not see a cardiologist due to COVID.

Written testimony

After 46 years in a small city in Alberta, I finally moved back to Calgary in September 2019, to be closer to my family and all of my specialists. I got referred to this wonderful family doctor and saw her a couple times. Then she said ‘Louise, you need to focus on your heart. That’s really your biggest problem, you know? Your other doctors are doing all the other stuff, but your heart is a real problem. And you should be talking to your cardiologist.’ 

And so I tried, but my cardiologist had retired after I saw him in July. And my new cardiologist didn’t have a clinic setup yet, and he didn’t have the staff. He didn’t have anything. I finally had to insist that I really needed to at least talk to him because my family doctor was saying ‘you’ve got a lot of issues he needs to talk about’. The cardiologist finally ordered tests that I did in March 2020, which turned out to be the start of COVID shut down. I finally got to talk to him in April, but it was on the phone. And that’s when he calmly added that I had heart failure. Unexpected words from a doctor I had never even met. 

After 7 more phone appointments, and with encouragement from my family doctor, I finally told him  that despite COVID, I needed to meet him in person. And he actually agreed! Even though everything was still in lockdown, I met my new cardiologist and a nurse, in the dark and deserted heart clinic at the university in April 2021. 

With 87 medical appointments in 2020, and similar in other years, COVID changed many of my physicians to be on phone calls instead of in person. I prefer meeting in person, but was grateful to talk to my doctors in any setting.

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