Visit to see an HDC advocate

During the term break, I called the customer service line for the local District Health Board to see if they could help. The nice guy there directed me back to the Health and Disability Advocacy service, which made sense. Although I'd already been there several months ago - and was advised that the HDC couldn't actually help in my case.

Well, I took the customer service rep's advice anyway, and emailed the HDC again for advice. The local advocate suggested I come in for a meeting with her. I wrote a "summary" (read: 9 pages) of our story, and off I went.

Well she was lovely. We spoke for over an hour and a half!

Turns out that I have 3 basic options:

1. Write letters to each of the health care providers who have given me/us bad service throughout this process.
2. Send my story to the Health and Disability Commissioner himself.
3. Do nothing.

By default, "doing nothing" is what we're already doing - just waiting out our time.

Because it won't take me much more work to write a cover letter and send my story off to the Commissioner, I think I will do that. I honestly don't expect it to have any impact on our case. It will probably take up to 8 weeks for a response to come back, and then he will have to make a decision on what direction our case should take. The Commissioner probably can't reduce our "penalty time" and even if he could, by the time the paper work is waded through, we will most likely be only our 18 month time of the waiting list anyway.

I'm fine with waiting lists, but not with illogical pseudo waiting lists. They suck.

The other option is to write letters to each of the providers concerned, telling them that their service is the pits and to pull up their socks. Again, I couldn't expect more than an apology letter from each of them, and at this stage I don't care for a bunch of useless apology letters.

I want to look forwards, not backwards. And that is a massively different way of looking at our situation, for me anyway.

Right now you're thinking "so what's the point of writing off to the Commissioner then?" Well, he has the power to review systemic problems and suggest changes. And that's what I really want. Well, that's what I want next to having our waiting time wiped. If the discrimination could be removed from the system then that would be incredibly positive. At this stage, that's all I can hope for, as there is nowhere else to turn to. I have literally tried all my options after this letter.

The good news is, once we finish waiting out 4.5 years (penalty time + waiting list) we will then be able to access fertility treatment.

It's just such a long way off.