A Fraser Valley woman is demanding accountability after her mother died following a 14-hour wait for care.
Luanora Irtenkauf, 55, died Sunday night at Abbotsford Regional Hospital.
She lived with a condition that caused her kidneys to chronically produce stones and her family said they were all familiar with the symptoms and treatment.
Irtenkauf’s daughter said on Dec. 13, her mother began feeling unwell and a urine test showed she had an infection.
Her doctor prescribed her antibiotics right away, but this time they didn’t seem to be working.
“At the time she was nauseous and puking on the 15th which is when we decided okay, now it’s time for the ER,” Hana Raufi told Global News.
“Like I said we’ve done this many times before. So I took her to the ER, we went in to check in, I immediately told them what the problem was. Because … we already knew.”
Raufi said she told the nurses at Abbotsford’s Regional Hospital that the infection was already confirmed by the family doctor and her mom needed to see the ER doctor as there is also a history of sepsis.
“One quick glance at her chart, that would have revealed that and they would have known the importance of dealing with this very promptly in order to save her life and not cause infection to spread and cause sepsis,” Raufi said.
However, they were told to take a seat in the waiting room.
Raufi said they could see her mother was in pain and she kept approaching the nurses’ station to ask how much longer the wait was going to be.
“It was met with the same answers every time ‘we don’t know’,” Raufi said. “We’re not sure there’s a waiting list or it’s priority-based. That’s another thing that they said. And I would say she’s not doing well. You can see her, you can visibly see her, you can hear her and they would say ‘but her vitals look fine’ and they would just dismiss her.”
Raufi said they spent about 12 hours in that waiting room.
Even after they were admitted, she said it still took some time to be seen by a doctor.
“She’s still in pain. She’s still struggling. She’s still asking for help and nothing.”
Raufi said she was enraged and stressed about what was happening to her mother.
“Through her screaming and crying I could hear the nurses have their own personal conversations about what their plans were for the following year in terms of whether one is going to the stampede, who knew who by, you know, which relation, mutual connections. I can hear them as if they weren’t even registering the noises behind them.”
When Irtenkauf was seen by the doctor, she was then ordered to get a CT scan for the abdominal pain.
When those results came back, Raufi said her mother was given IV antibiotics and painkillers.
However, they brought her mother back to a small waiting room and Raufi said she had to ask for her mother to at least be placed in a recliner, rather than a chair.
At that point, Raufi had been at the hospital from 5 p.m. on Dec. 15 until 7 a.m. on Dec. 16, so she went home thinking that her mother was comfortable and finally getting pain medications.
Raufi said she came back around 4 p.m. and found her mother had been moved into her own separate room in the ER. A nurse informed her that they had found an obstruction in her mother’s bowel.
She said she never received an answer to whether they were still treating her mother’s kidney infection or dealing with the bowel obstruction first.
Instead, Irtenkauf was sent for emergency surgery to place a stent in her urinary tract to help release the kidney stone.
The following day, Irtenkauf’s condition continued to deteriorate and she died in the ICU from multiple organ failure.
“Her body at that point was rapidly fading away,” Raufi told Global News Tuesday.
“So we never got to say goodbye.”
“I’m confused, you know, you go to a hospital because you need help, and they, I don’t know if they just were unsure or she was just bounced around too much,” she said.
“It makes me upset. It makes me feel like they were negligent. It makes me feel like they didn’t prioritize her. It makes me feel… like it just makes me angry. I’m just angry. You know, she deserved better.”
Raufi said she feels like the ER department failed her mother.
“We’d never expect her to go to hospital seeking help to then be in a worse condition,” she said.
“She was worse than when I brought her in.”
Abbotsford Hospital’s Medical Director, Dr. David Liu, told Global News he cannot comment on the specifics of the case but he sent his condolences to the family.
He said staff would assess patients based on their symptoms when they arrive at the emergency department.
“(The) patient will be triaged according to their vital signs and their history, and then care will be directed in a timely fashion according to their triage assessment,” Liu said.
However, Raufi is seeking accountability for her mother and has now filed an official complaint against Fraser Health.
“I’m speaking out because my family currently is not whole,” she said. “She’s missing. And I’m hoping that maybe I will keep somebody else’s family whole so that this doesn’t happen to somebody else’s friend or relative or mother.
“I want them to be held accountable. I don’t want them to just treat it like another day in the office, you know, and then they get to leave and be home and spend their holidays with their families and New Year’s and we don’t.
“I think it should be fair on both ends. I think they should answer for what they did. I think they owe us that much.”