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Galaxy of Pain



I thought I was ready for country living when my husband and I made the decision to move from downtown Toronto to rural Nova Scotia.  I grew up on a farm. We’d been vacationing here for more than a decade.  Just moving to a new province. No big deal.

It was charming, at first. We laughed at ourselves for trying to adopt a neighbour’s runaway rooster, feeding him gluten free crackers and giving him a name before “he” laid an egg in the weigela. I volunteered to help the Ladies’ Auxiliary at the local fire hall and found the squabbling over the right kind of cheese for the ham and cheese sandwiches highly amusing. That first December, I got a kick out of watching Santa walk into the South Shore Mall carrying his own lunch bucket.

Soon, though, charm turned to annoyance. Why did everyone drive at least 20 kilometers under the speed limit and stop twice during right hand turns?  Why did the highway crew paint new lines on the road and send a second crew out the next day to repair cracks, virtually obscuring the freshly painted lines?  Why could we not get on a list to get a new doctor when ours was so bad he googled our symptoms in front of us?

We began to wonder if we hadn’t moved to an entirely new country – a third world country at that.  When our inept doctor up and quit, we became numbers 58,522 and 58,521 on the bottom of the waiting list for health care. That was three years ago.  A simple prescription renewal now requires two separate 6-hour visits to the walk-in clinic (but only if it is open, because the clinic is also short of doctors.)

Cell phone and high speed internet are among the services that are spotty. So is animal control. When a huge stray cat repeatedly attacked ours and drew blood from my husband’s shin, it took 10 days for the Humane Society to return our daily calls. And, when someone finally did, their advice was to stay inside the house. (!) Nothing to be done about it.

This is a new and strange planet, where the very concept of “service” is alien. There’s no equivalent word in the universal translator.  When our less than two-year-old built-in microwave failed, we could not get anyone to come fix it, nor after two weeks of calling, could we hire anyone to simply help us take it down. My husband was told by one receptionist/ wife “If you want good service you should move to the city.”  True – but who says that to a potential customer?

The people are friendly, though. Most of our neighbours are wonderful.  One offered to look in on our house every day that we weren’t here.  Another couple gave us their car to use when ours broke down. “We’ve got two – here, you take it.” They’re fairly sanguine about the lack of service: frequent power outages, roads with potholes as big as the wildlife that meander across them, and, of course, the dire medical situation. “One’s as bad as the next,” they say about politicians. “Nothing to be done about it.”

 One couple took us under their wings. They introduced us to a wider group of neighbors and friends. They hosted back yard barbeques, fireworks on the river and Christmas day drinks.
He had a heart of gold, was always willing to look in on the cat, offering to fix things, and giving us advice. So much advice. He, like us, was a “Come From Away” and didn’t have a family doctor. Thus, when a medical crisis hit a year ago, it was unexpected, and he spent four days on a gurney in a hospital hallway.  He spent the last year of his life, in pain and in search of a diagnosis and treatment. She struggled to care for him. He died in January.

She became one of my dearest friends.  We planned weekly adventures: forays to Frenchy’s, strolls on the beach or trips to the city. We shared the unexpected ennui that came with retirement, swapped minor gripes about our spouses, and bemoaned the weight gain that accompanied our mutual adoration of white wine.

I’m about to turn 60 next year. My friend was just ten years older.

She had a doctor – a good one. But in this strange planet, annual check ups are the stuff dreams are made of.  It took more than two months to get an appointment, after she’d realized her pain was more than the grief of losing her partner. It was cancer. It had spread. Nothing to be done about it. She died in June.

Our Nova Scotia experience is bittersweet.

No longer Eva Gabor in Green Acres, I’m June Lockhart, Lost in Space.  

I am adrift in this new galaxy, struggling to find my way home. 

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