IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 30

This must be supported via medical certificates. Decisions are supported by
Medical Records containing all tests and
exams that show the disability, but if
they need more proof, they send you to
the doctor who saw you at the hospital.
The Commission can take months and
even years to make a definitive decision.
In the meantime, you go from one doctor
to another, all from many different
fields, and none of them wants to be
involved in offering medical opinions.
So, one has to put up with their ill will
and even mistreatment, and also with
broken equipment and a lack of lab materials. I have worked and studied for
years; I have mistreated myself enough;
I became ill to the point of becoming
handicapped but have kept working towards my retirement age; and ended up
falling in the hands of a Commission
that decided to make me go back to work
instead of retire me. I really cannot keep
on working; I will have to stop working
by my own decision and lose all those
years of work and the money I accumulated towards retirement. It is all or nothing at all.
Health services
As if this were not enough, as I was going from doctor’s office to doctor’s office, standing in line plagued by uncertainty (because that line’s order changes
when doctors take care of friends or acquaintances), waiting for three or four
hours with nowhere to sit, I then find
myself in situations in which I am not
able to do the MRI because the equipment at the hospital they’ve sent me to,
Calixto García University Hospital,-

is broken (it breaks down four times a
year), and so the waiting list gets longer.
The same thing happened with the nerve
conduction equipment required for a
lumbar sciatic condition I was not diagnosed for promptly enough. After eight
months, through the friend of a friend of
a friend, I was able to resolve this situation. As I waited for this, my pain got
worse to the point that I had a hard time
sleeping, walking, and sitting. I am able
to mitigate that pain only by medications
given to me by friends in Cuba and
abroad. If a patient doesn’t have obvious
symptoms, there are few analyses and
limitations on getting diagnosed on time.
One must wait for the illness to clearly
manifest itself to be able to get the necessary treatment. I have been asked to
wait a year so they can figure out what
disease causes my immunological disorder because they are not able to run specific tests. I have been waiting for more
than two years for an electromyography
because there are no electrodes. Neither
the doctors nor the technical personnel
know if these will be purchased someday. You have access to these tests only
through a friend or with enough money.
If after being seen by a doctor you manage to find the prescribed medications,
you can truly feel you are one of the
luckiest people in the world. The drug
formulary available in national currency
(CUPs) is short, and production and distributions unstable. People who are ill
get impatient and run to neighborhood
pharmacies feeling irritated and desperate. One’s options improve if one has
access to convertible pesos (CUCs) to

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