Strip Mall Medicine in Ottawa, Ontario, Part Two: The Plot Thickens

Strip Mall Medicine in Ottawa, Ontario, Part Two: The Plot Thickens

Based on a John Grisham novel of the same name, Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic courtroom drama The Rainmaker recounts the trials and tribulations of fledgling lawyer Rudy Baker, played by Matt Damon, who is forced to take work as an ambulance chaser with a firm headed by an attorney of somewhat questionable ethics known as “Bruiser” Stone, whose head office is a strip mall bar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainmaker_(1997_film)

In our new home of Ottawa, Ontario, we’ve discovered “Bruiser” Stone strip mall medicine!

When we arrived in the nation’s capital, we quickly learned that family doctors were as rare as hen’s teeth, with 250,000 or more supplicants forming an interminable line in search of that one elusive GP. I wrote about our quest here:

https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/i-cant-get-nofamily-doctor/

The family medicine situation is so dire that our apartment building offers a “doctor in a box” as an inducement for prospective tenants, providing a device that connects infirm renters with a mysterious disembodied physician located somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania.

I kid you not. Truth is often stranger than fiction, particularly in the contemporary clown world of Ottawa, Ontario.

Now my wife and I are seniors with multiple health issues too long to recount, and after being sent packing on a number of occasions by overburdened practitioners, we finally dredged up a walk-in clinic that would receive us, in a far flung no man’s land, specifically a strip mall just a small step up from Bruiser Stone’s bar.

The attending physician had a first name, but only provided a last initial. We dubbed him Trespassers W, after Piglet’s tale in Winnie the Pooh:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/a-a-milne/winnie-the-pooh/text/chapter-3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZC2KQbwWUE

Upon returning for a second appointment, we discovered that Trespassers W had mysteriously acquired a last name. Spurred by the legitimacy that the additional moniker seemed to afford him, we began to plead and grovel, baying and howling and rending our garments in a lachrymose request to be accepted as “his” patients. In order to quell our pathetic entreaties, Trespassers W agreed to take us on. Proffering an official-looking clipboard, he had us sign on the proverbial dotted line, while we blubbered and jibbered with gratitude.

Trespassers is just starting his practice and he clearly took pity on the two miserable aged wretches who quailed and quivered before him.

We now have a family doctor!

As a postscript to this harrowing saga, I must tell you about the great pharmacy walk-in caper.

It turns out that pharmacists in Ontario are licenced to prescribe certain medications for “minor” ailments.

Well, my wife suffers from chronic eye infections and last week she was hit by a particularly nasty suppurating affliction that required immediate attention. A trip to distant Trespassers W being out of the question, she stumbled into a murky strip mall type drugstore located a mere stone’s throw from our home, where an unctuously solicitous pharmacist actually seemed to have a physician stashed away in a closet-like space labelled “clinic” in a dark corner of his establishment.

It turned out that she needed the imprimatur of a credentialed sawbones to treat her impending sepsis.

Sensing the urgency of the matter at hand, the pharmacist offered her an appointment with the creature lurking behind the broom closet door, who seemed to be a mysterious clone of the Wizard of Oz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ZHYw0nTcQXc

The “attending physician” turned out to be a disembodied entity working from home who offered soothing advice from the depths of a laptop and promised the coveted prescription in a tone of voice resembling that of Hal, the computer who eventually went rogue in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJ8cAGm6JE

So now we have not one but two physicians at our disposal, to wit, Trespassers W and Hal, the chimeric wizard who works from behind a curtain at home.

Your friend,

Robert