Daniel Henstra

Please share this widely! I couldn't be more terrified of our country's healthcare crisis and @ONThealth can do better! Ontario healthcare is broken and we've long known it. It's been like this my entire lifetime, and I'm not exactly young. This is my daughter's IV line, which she's been connected to since 2:00am this morning. She's been awake for well over 24 hours, as have I, as we await care at @StMarysGenHosp in Kitchener, Ontario. We arrived shortly after 10:00pm yesterday evening after my daughter complained of excruciating abdominal pain. As usual, care took hours to arrive. She was given a bed where she squirmed and sobbed until finally, shortly after 2:00am, the doctor paid her a visit and ordered pain meds to make things bearable. It was evident by 4:00am that we were almost certainly looking at appendicitis, as the pain was centralizing in the lower right quadrant. We all suspected this, but we couldn't confirm until 8:00am because... apparently we don't have ultrasound technicians during the evening. No one has medical emergencies in the middle of the night, I suppose? For those who haven't had the pleasure of an inflamed appendix, appendicitis often leads to a ruptured appendix after a period of increasing pain, and that rupture can be fatal. Fortunately for us that hasn't happened yet, but time matters. There's nothing this hospital can do for us as 'we need to confirm it's appendicitis'. We wait until 8:00am By 5:00am we are told that my daughter needs to give up her emergency room bed. Someone else needs it. She is still in pain, but will now make due sitting in the waiting room, putting pressure on her abdomen in the process. There's no negotiation—there are no beds available. We wait until 8:00am. We wait until 9:00am. Some guy walks in with a Tim Horton's cup during our tenure and gets the first ultrasound slot. I'm sure his condition was just as severe. By 10:00am the doctor confirmed what had been evident for hours—we've got a case of appendicitis on our hands and we need to move forward with emergency surgery. ...Except... they can't do that in this particular hospital and @grhospitalkw doesn't have any beds available either. No one knows when they will have a bed for my daughter who is both sleep deprived and in critical medical condition. I inquire. An hour? A bed by noon? Will we even get one today? No one has an answer. No one wants to have the conversation. I can tell I am a burden to the overworked staff. We return to the waiting room and my daughter keeps sitting. She's been awake now since yesterday morning. Her pain flares up every few hours and—after being brought almost to tears the edge is subdued with another dose of pain suppressants. She's refused a bed because there are no beds available, and I can't take her home to her bed because she needs surgery—though there's none of that available either. She hasn't eaten in more than 18 hours and she's been told that she's not allowed one bite because she might have surgery any moment... Or perhaps never... so we sit and wait—watching her IV machine go into upstream occlusion every 5 minutes. The nurses don't have time to do anything about it. This is a simple problem to fix. Fund our healthcare system! @SylviaJonesMPP, @fordnation, our citizens deserve better. Fix it!