On Monday, Weyburn, Sask., farmer Brad Zastrow and an auctioneer looked over his equipment and set the sale date that will end his life as a farmer.
Then Zastrow sat down with his brother to listen to the news about Saskatchewan’s health-care crisis, something that could contribute to end his life.
Zastrow was set for a CT scan and liver biopsy in a Regina hospital the next morning, and any resumption of the nurses’ strike would cancel the procedures.
“The way my luck’s been going, we’ll probably have a strike tonight,” wryly commented Zastrow, who doctors say is dying of liver cancer.
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If he gets the tests done he may be able to take radical treatments that could save his life, he thinks. If he doesn’t get the tests, all he can do is sit around and let the cancerous tumors, which have spread through his body, continue growing.
Zastrow is one of many people caught in the middle of Saskatchewan’s health-care crisis, which the provincial government and a number of health-care unions have been fighting over wages and working conditions. A 10-day nurses’ strike crippled the provincial hospital system, but the situation has improved since the nurses agreed to go back to work.
But the nurses say they may strike again. Conciliation talks between the nurses and the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations broke down last week. Facilitator Steve Kelleher said neither side had been flexible enough to reach a deal.
The nurses’ strike has generated worry among farm families who need health care.
Alida, Sask., farmer Garnet Ball and his wife saw Garnet’s 92-year-old mother shunted from a local hospital, where she was recovering from a broken hip, to a care home farther away as soon as the strike occurred. Then they heard there were plans to move her to a care home two hours away.
Edith Ball had been doing well in a seniors home in Redvers, but Garnet said she was confused by all the new places she was taken and by the new people taking care of her. Members of her family were visiting two or three times a day while still trying to run farms and hold down jobs.
But Ball and Zastrow don’t hold resentment for the nurses. Ball said he thinks the government has treated the nurses badly.
“I’ve never seen anything but compassion and patience from nurses,” he said. “When you have pushed them so far that they refuse, you know someone has done something bad to them.”
Zastrow, who had surgery just before the strike, said he saw short-staffing first-hand.
“If my wife hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have had hardly any care, not even a sponge bath,” he said.
On Monday afternoon Zastrow was hoping to get the results of the CT scan and biopsy so that he could make some decisions about his life. He might agree to experimental drug therapy or herbal therapy if there is a chance either could save his life.
But until he gets the tests, which are threatened by the staffing crisis, his life is on hold.
“When this health-care problem started, I joked to my wife that I’m sure glad that I’m young and don’t need to go to hospital,” said Zastrow, who only found out two months ago that he has cancer.
“I kind of forgot it doesn’t matter what age you are.”
