“When I take public transit to see my family doctor, it’s a five-hour round trip”

When I moved from Port Perry to Toronto in 2014 for theatre school, I didn’t seriously consider getting a new family doctor—I’d been seeing mine since I was a kid, and I was used to him.

Aside from the bouts of tonsillitis I’d get once or twice a year, I was healthy. So, when I wanted to see someone, I’d just go to a walk-in clinic in Chinatown, near where I lived at the time. After a few visits, the doctor was aware of my medical history and would prescribe me the antibiotics I needed.

Read more: Dispatches from Ontario’s broken health care system

Within a few years, however, my needs shifted dramatically. I went through an abusive relationship, which significantly harmed my mental health and made it difficult for me to trust men with my body. I avoided booking appointments with my family doctor unless they were absolutely necessary. Instead, I cobbled together a ragtag system to meet my health needs. I continued going to walk-in clinics for routine issues like tonsillitis, but I’d go to a medical clinic for my pap smears. And I’d visit my family doctor as a last resort when I had a more complicated issue, like when I needed a prescription for Ativan to help control my panic attacks.

By 2018, I knew I had to take my health more seriously, and that included finding a physician in Toronto. I went online to register with Health Care Connect in the hope of finding a woman family doctor. That’s when I got a message saying I had to “release” my current family doctor before I could be put on the wait list. Even though I rarely saw him at that point, I was worried about not having a doctor at all. What if I needed to renew my Ativan prescription or get a suspicious spot checked out because skin cancer runs in my family?

Health Care Connect estimated a wait time of 90 days to be matched, but I knew people who’d been on the list for more than two years. Some had been able to find a family doctor only after cold-calling clinics or getting leads from friends whose own doctors were accepting new patients. I tried that too, without success. My guess is that insisting on a woman doctor also complicated matters for me.

In the summer of 2023, I got a letter from my family doctor saying he was retiring and that someone else would be taking over his practice. Amazingly, his replacement is a younger woman I feel totally comfortable with. There’s only one problem: she’s in Port Perry, so when I want to see her, it’s a full-day affair.

If I’m lucky, I can borrow a car from my sister or brother-in-law and there isn’t too much traffic, making the total drive there and back around three hours—but there’s always traffic. If I have to resort to public transit, it’s a five-hour round trip: I’m taking the TTC from my place in the Annex to Union Station, hopping on a GO train and then either taking a bus from Whitby to Port Perry or getting my parents to pick me up at the GO station and drive me to my appointment. And then there’s the question of work: I’m a bar manager at a restaurant, so if I can’t get an appointment to see my doctor on one of my two days off a week, I have to give up a shift and deal with the lost income.

The current situation, in other words, is far from ideal—I’m even thinking of getting my own car so my access to care will be that much simpler. But, even with all of the inconveniences, I’m grateful to have a family doctor at all. In an ideal world, I’d have someone exactly like my physician except in Toronto. But that dream feels far-fetched. Our primary health care system has been such a mess for so long, and I just can’t see it getting better any time soon.