By Stress Management Cat [Twitter name], re-posted from Twitter on March 30, 2020, with permission. Stress Management Cat is a person with lived experience in the GTA who reflects on their and their partner’s experience during the #COVID19 pandemic.

Canadian healthcare can be like a weird adventure game where you have to navigate various puzzles and obstacles to find the secret item that will allow you to reach the final objective. After years of dealing with Ontario healthcare systems Bear and I finally found good care.

Like the 8 month search for an apartment we could afford that would actually rent to us, a lifetime of navigating unhealthy relationships for both of us before meeting, life on our level of society is fraught with obstacles a lucky scant few can get around. It's no way to live.

I don't know what gives us the stubbornness and luck combined that we ever find the things we need. Like a doctor that prescribes the medicine we need in the manner we actually take it. We went through two other doctors and combined spent almost a decade in OST to get this.

There were lots if times when giving up seemed like the way to go. It's been a rough ride up until now, but we've kept beating at it hoping eventually it would pay off to be patient. We finally reached our goal, nobody overdosed, got endocarditis or went to jail on the way.

This is why the system fails so often. Because along the way, before they climbed the mountain, slayed the monster, found the magic wand and then invoked the spirits who point the way they say "this is never gonna work". I didn't know if it would, I just kept assuring my partner.

We came home and Bear almost immediately collapsed in bed, and now sleeps the kind of sleep you can only finally have when you're certain you'll have medication that mostly works for the foreseeable future. It's been awhile, I'd be surprised if he doesn't sleep all night.

The only reason we have a shot at getting the real proper medication for Bear is *because of the pandemic*. If methadone isn't effective it is finally an option to prescribe hydromorphone. It's a shame it had to come to this. It's kinda confusing feeling good about this mess.

The overdose epidemic didn't get us open access to medication. I left a urine sample for the last time in the foreseeable future, and that was because handling and exchanging cups of urine in a pandemic is just poor infection control practice. It took thousands of other deaths.

When suddenly our monitoring and observed doses became a potential transmission vector it was no longer necessary. The longer scripts are meant to keep us from travelling. The reason we're being given concessions is to keep us from moving around and protect others, not us.

As much as it's frustrating that the changes come both at such a difficult time for everyone, and for reasons more focused on literally everyone else rather than us as patients, I'll take the longer scripts. I didn't really want another five weeks of this crap anyway.

I hope these reforms don't get clawed back. In a sense we have a big experiment in patient self determination right now. A lot of people being given more leeway than usual. If there aren't increased harms as a result it's difficult to argue the old more expensive way is better.

Between less urine screening, less trips to pharmacies and less unnecessary trips to the doctor we are saving OHIP thousands of dollars per patient over the course of months. All that testing a frequent dispensing is very costly. This is an enormous cost savings happening.

I think when the province can be shown the loosened prescribing practices are not only more effective at diverting users from the street, but cost far less, it will be easy to push permanent change. Saving the healthcare system millions after a huge pandemic will seem attractive