Sunday, May 13, 2007, yesterday, marked the first Mother's Day we've spent without the presence of our mother, Gloria Calvert.
Mom died last summer on July 25, 2006. Several months later, I received a letter, dated October 26, from our member of Parliament, Patrick Brown, informing me that Tony Clement wanted Patrick to pass on to me information about Mom's next step in the drug process and about cancer. It began with an apology about the delay in responding.
In the next paragraph, he began by stating that cancer is a serious disease, which seemed a little redundant, as if we didn't already know this. At that time, this very delayed response seemed insensitive, inappropriate, and inept in every way. We therefore felt sad, frustrated, and then, obviously, angry. However, those powerful, yet not really positive or purposeful emotions eventually transformed themselves into something else, something that whispered to us to do something and take action. It was most certainly Mom's voice. She was always interested and active in local politics and believed in the benefits of living in a democratic society. It was then that Hit the Slope came to fruition.
This now annual fundraiser, held at Horseshoe Resort outside Barrie, Ontario, is to honour our mother and to help build the Simcoe-Muskoka Regional Cancer Centre at Barrie's Royal Victoria Hospital. It's a great hospital where, unfortunately, we spent a lot of our time.
Mom's voice also defused our anger and confusion when we received those letters and we heard her voice echo, “What's done is done.” Although her life here is done, we'd like to offer just a few suggestions, based on our concrete experience, as to how we can avoid such situations in the future, particularly you honourable people who actually have tangible power and opportunity to make change.
We would like to address the effectiveness of the current CDR and give some of our insights on what we think about the addition of a new layer of bureaucracy, the lack of transparency, the lack of public input, and the lack of timely access to new drugs.
We'll begin with the last issue: lack of timely access to new drugs.
Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2005. I wrote numerous letters and had a visit with our MP, Patrick, and wrote two letters to the health minister, from whom I received no reply at all until Patrick became our liaison. Mom's prognosis was not great, and it was inferred that she had about six months to live. It took about six months to hear any sort of reply. In addition, the reply we got offered no real solution, and I was advised that my concern was a provincial issue and that I should contact the Minister of Health, which I had already attempted to do twice, six months prior to this. This is what I would call defer, defer, defer, and it seemed to me to be a little bit of passing the buck, as they say.
When you're dealing with a life and death situation, time is of the essence, and there's no time for bureaucratic back and forth. We never know how long we have, but when it's something like cancer, we know it's not long. So I'm sure you can see why we would have been frustrated.