Michael Garron /Toronto East General/Toronto
On thursday in kapuskasing my mother started coughing up a lot of blood, we called an ambulance and they rushed her to the hospital. She went to the hospital, and they sent her by ambulance to timmins ontario for a CT of her lungs and they thought she had pneumonia. They sent her back to kapuskasing and she spent the night in the ICU but the next day her test showed no sign of infection so they discharged her.
That night it happened again she started coughing blood…..lots like 2 cups of bright red blood coming from her lungs….she was gurgling, anyway they decided to air lift her 14 hours away to your hospital in toronto in case it happened again and they could not stop the bleeding. She did not want to go because she suffers from panic attacks and was afraid to get stranded in toronto. Her doctor assured her that they would fly her back home from toronto. They had to give her 2 valiums just to get on the plane.
She got to your hospital Saturday night around 10, was put into isolation told not to hit her call button too much and left alone, she had no pillow on her bed. Sunday morning comes and she gets no breakfast, then she gets no lunch, she finally had to ask for food and the nurse acted surprised she had not been fed yet. She finally received some food around 2:30 in the afternoon…..she asked for a pillow but only got a folded blanket. They booked a test for the next morning so she was told she could not eat after midnight.
This morning she went for her test…a scope of some kind around 10 am, when the test was done an attendant wheeled her back to her room and they both noticed she had peed herself and the stretcher from so much coughing, he put her back into her bed soaking wet full of pee and left her there. she finally had to call a nurse to help her get changed and change her wet bed.
she received no lunch afterwards and at 2:30 she asked for some food. the nurse said she was busy but would see what she could do. then another doctor came and gave her a chest x-ray and said that since she was not sick she would no longer be in isolation and would be discharged in toronto. She instantly started to panic and told the doctor that kapuskasing had told her she would be sent back the same way she got there, by plane. the doctor informed her that they would not spend 10 thousand dollars to send a healthy person home. She was worried she would start coughing blood again and he told her that since it had been almost 3 days with nothing then she was fine.
At 3:30 she asked for food again since she had not eaten all day and was told they would look into it. at 6:00 she called me because she still had not received any food that day after having asked 3 different people. She finally saw a tray being left outside her window and we were just about to get off the phone when her lungs filled with blood and she could not breath, she hung up the phone.
She phoned me back at 7:30 to tell me she was ok, but no doctor had been to see her since she started coughing blood and the blood was still in her room. Her I.V had been beeping for about 15 min but the nurse said she would only deal with it after she was done doing paperwork. She finally saw the nurse walk over to her tray, stick her fingers in the vegetables and proceed to take the cold hour and a half food into my mother. The first food she gets all day sat there for almost 2 hours on the nurses desk before it was brought in cold to my sick mom!!!
They want to discharge my mom, who suffers from panic attacks in toronto…..14 hours away from home. She has no jacket, no purse or I.D and maybe $60 cash on her and have her fend for herself. To me this is unthinkable. These are not the only negligent things that have happened, but im so upset right now i cant think of them all. She has not received any results or spoken to any doctors about what could be wrong with her and the nurses wont tell her anything.
She actually for the first time since she has been there, received a menue to fill out for the following day, she asked a nurse for a pen and was told to do it on night shift.
She cant even leave her room to go to a vending machine as the nurses say she is still in isolation.
Something needs to be done about this….right now, this is not right, this is Canada not some 3rd world country.