Dear editor,
It was Dec. 22. Airdrie and the surrounding area had just been blanketed in 40 centimetres of snow, and I went into labour three weeks early. My husband whipped out the snow brush and violently discarded heaping mounds of snow from the top of his vehicle. He scraped the frost from his windows with haste, and threw my travel bag onto the frigid seats.
We begged our wonderful neighbour to watch our older son, and then hit the road toward Calgary. With gritted teeth, we raced down the highway. Stranded vehicles littered the sides of the road, and even with winter tires, we were sliding wildly at every turn.
Upon arriving closer to the hospital, we started seeing more and more cars, trucks, and even buses stuck in the middle of intersections. Somehow, my husband and I made it to the Peter Lougheed Centre for the arrival of our beautiful baby, despite the carnage on the roads. I often think of this day and wonder how much safer that experience would have been, if the city I lived in had its own hospital.
Airdrie now has a population of more than 70,000 people, and is one of the fastest growing cities in Alberta. Despite this, if one of our residents is in need of respiratory care, hemodialysis, surgical services, or obstetrics, they must make the trek into Calgary. Surely with a bustling population of our size, Calgary's hospitals are impacted by our inability to care for our own population. Why are we left without services, when much smaller cities are given full stand alone hospitals?
Take Olds for example. They have a population of just over 9,700 people, yet their hospital is fully equipped to serve their citizens for an amplitude of different health-care needs. Lacombe is another small city that also has its own hospital, despite only having a population of just over 14,000 residents. In fact, Devon, Wetaskiwin, Vegreville, Sundre, and Stettler all have hospitals. So if it isn't population dictating which municipalities get a hospital, then what is it?
As I despairingly search through Alberta Health Services' current capital projects, I can see there doesn't seem to be a hospital in Airdrie's near future. Perhaps if we all pester and prod whichever party wins the next provincial election enough, our stars will change. For now, every time it snows, I will think of all the people in Airdrie trying to reach a hospital, and hope they make it there safely.
Crystal Kelly
Airdrie
