Turns out BF was not fine.

He didn’t get any medication when we left, doctor just said it was a virus which was the reason for his fatigue but the blood test that came back said he was ‘fine’… except they didn’t do a specific blood test for what he was asking for, instead, they did a general one on cholesterol etc…

So CB, I want to do a public post about your nasty comment about how you think that I didn’t care about the 2 old ladies because you totally went off the handle (you probably have some experience with someone old in your life not breathing well, is my guess which is totally understandable about why you get all fussd up at me).

My real point was that there were 2 doctors, possibly 3 on call. One is always assigned to the major patients like the 2 old ladies who couldn’t breathe.

WHERE THE HELL WERE THE OTHER TWO?

Also, I’ve had severe asthma as a child, so I know how it feels to not breathe and feel like you can’t catch your breath or get enough oxygen.

So don’t get mad at ME for being insensitive to them. I wasn’t, you just read it wrong.

I am not saying “FUCK THE OLD LADIES”, I was just wondering how the hell on a full staff and only about 5-6 people in the Emergency Room, could we be waiting there for 8 hours and not end up getting any treatment or medication except a “Go home and rest, you’ll be fine.”?

I KNOW what they had was serious if they had to be picked up in an ambulance.

I am not saying that we should have any priority over them but they just seemed utterly disorganized and inefficient considering the circumstances and that no one had their leg cut off and needed 3 doctors all there at once for something major and everyone else had to be put on hold.

I get it.

Doctors think most patients are dreaming up their symptoms, like we’re all hypochondriacs and they cannot know that we avoid going to hospitals or doctors like the plague, whereas others go for every little thing that bothers them.

We only go (BF and I) if we really feel like something is wrong.

We’re heading to a larger city hospital now (we were NOT in a city hospital, in a smaller one off the island), and now I expect that we’ll be waiting there for another 8 hours or more, just because one fucking idiot doctor couldn’t do her job right and properly diagnose a patient she thought was just a hypochondriac who was complaining about a fatigue after a long hard day at work.

BF and I aren’t working now, so we can’t blame any fatigue on having a job or work responsibilities (I know it’s the recession/crisis, but we’re NOT stressed about money), and this is clearly something else altogether, what he’s experiencing.

She is just pooh-poohing everything because “excessive fatigue” is something that cannot be measured, neither can insomnia (she’s not there to see it), or lack of appetite.

Idiot doctors. Now we’re going to shuffle from ER to ER trying to get a doctor to properly diagnose us without pretending to do their job.

BF tried to call doctors to set up appointments to see them as per the advice of that idiot ER doctor and you know what they said?

You have to go to ER for that. We can’t help you.

Nice.

Passing the buck seems to be the specialty here.

And I’m mad because you may think it’s “FREE HEALTHCARE, WOO HOO!!!”… but it’s not really free.

See, we pay for all of this in our taxes. We pay for it in the bad roads with nasty potholes that don’t get fixed in Montreal (they’re really awful, worse than in Ontario), and the bridges that are almost close to collapsing because they haven’t been fixed or maintained for years… all because all the money is going to patients who abuse the system and then end up screwing it for the rest of us.

Did you know that they can get free breast implants here?

Oh yea. I’m paying for some stripper’s boobs in my taxes because she has low self esteem due to smaller breasts.

GIVE ME A BREAK.

I’m mad because my tax dollars (taxes in the highest income bracket can be near 50%!!!!) is going to pay for that kind of crap. And we get punished in a way, because we avoid going to hospitals, and we both make good money, to pay for the rest of the people out there.

I’m not saying that my high income means I should get better healthcare, but I expected a REASONABLE amount of care, not 8 hours of waiting in a room with very few patients to see, considering what we pay for in our taxes and our quality of life.

I did a lot of changes to my hair and skin since I last started the blog.

I used to dye my hair, put lots of product in it, use a different conditioner depending on the day (weekends was for heavy conditioning), until I got on this frugal kick and started using up what I had lying around in the bathroom.

Namely, half used bottles.

Then I realized that it was all a lot of money for nothing because I was blessed to have naturally beautiful hair (if I could just let it breathe!) and all those yo-yoing with products was making it worse.

I’ve stopped dying my hair.

I never blow dry or flat iron it.

I never use ANY product on it.

I just shampoo and condition*

*(am starting a new regimen with baking soda and apple cider vinegar but I want to try it out for a month or so before I declare it a good thing for my hair).

My hair has gotten sleeker, shinier and flatter.

Hard to explain, but when I dyed my hair, I must have damaged it so much that the shaft’s cuticles lifted up and made my hair feel fuller, and more voluminous because it was damaged.

Now that I don’t dye it, the cuticles are smooth and sleek, and I feel like I have less hair.

I lamented to BF the other day that I may be losing a lot of hair (I was freaking out!) then he looked at my head, ran his fingers through my hair and said he didn’t think so. It was just less poofy because it wasn’t as damaged as before.

He’s totally right.

My hair is undamaged, shiny, soft, and natural.

I’ve saved money on hair dye, trips to the salon to dye it every month or so to keep the colour up, hair products and fancy shampoos and conditioners (like Kerastase which by the way, is not worth the money).

Financially speaking…

$35/month to dye my hair if I went to a salon that does not include the cut because I still get it cut

$35 x 12 months = $420/year

$10/month of product to put in my hair to make it shiny

$10 x 12 months = $120/year

$15/month EXTRA in special shampoos and conditioners

$15 x 12 months = $180

No blowdrying or Flat irons.. uh.. electricity saved? It also damages my hair less which means less product.

Not bad. Now what if I saved $720/year until I retired (40 years), and earned a modest interest rate of 7%?

I plopped the numbers into Vancity’s Savings Calculator.

Can you believe that? $148,293 SAVED. Just from doing something as simple as going au naturel.

Now, I am not trying to make anyone feel bad for dying their hair or spending money on it because it’s not what I do, but this works for ME and I end up spending the money on other things like… accessories on Etsy (hah!), but the savings are interesting.

And that’s after tax! I could use that $60/month towards my Starbucks habit, or for something else that I love.

The best part is I’m not even doing anything to ‘earn’ that $60 back. Just cutting back on hair stuff and hair maintenance makes a difference. And I was blessed with low-maintenance hair to boot.

Let’s see if my tune changes when I start getting greys, hmm?

(P.S. Try the calculation on something else! Like saving money on lunches by making them yourself, or anything else that you could do to save even $50 a month and you’ll see that it makes a big difference)

But for me, all of this is not really about the cost

I couldn’t care less that my hair washing costs $0.12 less each time, or that I save $141,000 in the long run by not dying my hair or getting fancy with it.

I really wanted to cut out untested chemicals for long-term human usage 2009 as my NYE resolution and to also help stop shoving environmental nasties down the drain.

I am going to do my final post on Baking Soda and ACV as a shampoo alternative in about 2 days.