They talk about many people coming over to the U.S. and paying cash to receive surgeries that they or their loved ones desperately need. It sounds like a horror film to me, aging baby boomers waiting six months to a year to get hip replacements.

Also, many people who have chronic illnesses in these countries you are pretty much s.o.l. It takes a very long time to get to see a specialist to discover your diagnosis.

Two years ago I had a DVT, deep vein thrombosis and I was in the hospital for a month. I underwent 8 procedures because the DVT went from the level of my abdominal aorta down to my calf. I talked to several people from the U.K. who had been waiting two years to have surgery.

Perhaps if I lived in the U.K. or Canada, I might be in some institution, writhing in bed with pain and I guess they would chalk up my apathy to not being able to do activities of daily living do to my pain and depression.

It took me six years to find out I had a complex regional pain syndrome, four years to find out I had abdominal migraines, 20 years to find out I had Celiac Sprue and then there is the “Big One.” I had neurological symptoms for five years and no neurologist could figure it why.

My husband asked a neurologist to do a brain MRI and it was consistent with FTD which is a terminal degenerative brain disease. Even so, the doctor told me I didn’t have it because it was rare and I didn’t exhibit the symptoms.

Fortunately, because my husband had been through the same song and dance with my other diagnoses, he took me to Johns Hopkins and I do have FTD.

As I said, I dread to think of my sad state if I lived in one of those countries.