It's certainly a commonly reported issue on these discussion boards, but we don't know how representative these posts are of Canadians' experiences with eBay International Shipping. There may be far more eIS-facilitated sales that go off without a hitch but we simply don't know about them. Also, a lot of people who do post about the tracking dead-ending on their shipment don't post follow-up information that could let us know where the difficulty was (if they found out) or if the item eventually made it to its destination.
I usually don't recommend that people start checking the tracking of their item until just before the estimated delivery window as there's just about nothing they can do with the tracking information anyway except worry or get their blood pressure up. Since we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube now, I'll ask, how have you been checking the tracking information? If it's just through your "My eBay," I suggest you try a third-party tracking site (Parcelsapp is a pretty good one) to see if perhaps you're looking at a situation where the tracking events from the carriers after Illinois haven't been getting transmitted properly to eBay.
Having said that, you don't say what kind of medal you purchased, be it an Olympic gold medal or a military medal. (I'm guessing the latter from your eBay ID.) There may be something about the nature of your medal that's tripped up eIS's squeamish system and the logistics company responsible for the shipment may not want to touch it with a three metre pole. The tracking should state if a restriction on the item has dead-ended its transport, but I haven't heard of any examples of that happening with eIS. (It sometimes did with the old Global Shipping Program.)
Anyway, while you're not exactly needlessly worried, you are a little early to be concerned, that's all. While I appreciate that getting the item would be the best outcome for you, it does appear that getting a full refund for a non-received item forwarded through eIS is usually pretty straightforward. Sorry you're going through this.
