Archive for January 23rd, 2008
Dying in a foreign language
My grand-mother, a small woman who grew up in an east-end Montreal Catholic convent and her husband, a doctor’s son from Québec City, sent their kids to English schools. They stepped out of Québec’s Great Darkness and raised their sons to be equally comfortable on either side of Montreal’s two solitudes.
Last year my grand-mother died at the Montreal General Hospital. From her death bed she was still the one reaching out to the other side as one unilingual English-speaking nurse and orderly after the other came and went in her room. Right to the very last moment. Until the unilingual doctor pronounced her dead. In English.
TVA just aired a story about Quebecers unable to receive health care in French.
It really is happening. Sick, scared and grieving patients and their families, even highly politicized like myself, are in no mood to start fighting with the people who quite literally have their lives in their hands.
Although English-speakers are only 8% or 9% of Québec’s population, the McGill University Health Center was awarded 50% of the budget to build one of two new university hospitals in Montreal.
You really believe in bilingualism and the equality of all Quebecers? Really? Then you don’t need your own separate hospital, do you?
Put our tax money where your mouth is. unseulmegachu.org
