A Vancouver Island family is devastated after making a trip to the Lower Mainland this week for surgery, only to have it cancelled two hours before it was scheduled to begin.
Ethan Baldwin will turn 20 in only a few weeks. For the past seven years, he’s been waiting for surgery to help straighten his spine.
The wait time for the surgery had been complicated by his age, the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that it’s a multi-day procedure. However, they finally received a call that the procedure was scheduled for this week.
So, Baldwin and his family celebrated Christmas early, took time off work and booked accommodations in Vancouver.
Two hours before the surgery was scheduled to begin, the family received a call that it had been cancelled due to the lack of ICU beds available.
Baldwin’s mother, Jennifer Lavoie, told Global News they decided to try surgery in 2016 and were told the wait would be about 18 months.
“We waited another two years, that would put us at four, then COVID happened, it was too awkward and then we were scheduled last year, in December, that would have put us at six years, but they had an outbreak of flu so we got bumped,” Lavoie said. “If they had done it when he was younger, it would have been a one-day surgery in and out and be quick, now we’re potentially a two-day surgery with the risk of paralyzation.”
She said due to the seven-year wait, the surgery is now two-days, separate procedures, each lasting six hours, with an ICU stay in between.
Lavoie said the surgery is considered elective and her son has the “option” to just live with his condition while it gets worse as he ages. But she said isn’t an option for them.
Baldwin’s condition doesn’t allow him to sit for too long and it can get very uncomfortable. He can’t learn to drive a car or participate in certain activities with his friends.
“At this point, you learn to accept it,” he said. “It is what it is. You can’t change nothing about it.”
The family never thought a cancellation could happen to them again.
Last December, they booked ferries, took time off work, lost weeks’ worth of wages, hired dog-sitters and the surgery was cancelled three days before it was set to take place.
This time, Lavoie said they were in the middle of prepping her son’s back 30 minutes before they were set to leave for the hospital when they received the news this surgery was cancelled.
“(It) is a huge inconvenience to us out-of-town people who they don’t realize, you take half your home with you and go the night before to be prepared and at the hospital and available,” she said. “There’s not a ferry early enough to accommodate that out-of-town patient. They do not realise the financial and emotional and physical burden this has placed on us that goes far beyond a slight inconvenience with a long wait list.”
Lavoie said she gets extremely emotional about how devastating it was to get that close to the surgery only to be told “Not again.
“It’s like almost being able to taste your miracle and then be told that again and home you go. And it’s very hard for my son, who feels like the system has forgotten him for seven-plus years. He doesn’t count. His emotional and physical well-being isn’t important. He, basically the system has failed him in every way.”
B.C.’s Health Minister Adrian Dix said Wednesday that he hasn’t heard about Baldwin’s case but he will look into it.
“It’s a very difficult circumstance, travelling for care,” he said. “With surgeries, as you know, we have a surgical renewal commitment. We’re doing a breathtaking number of surgeries this October, November and December in the midst of a very significant demand to health care. So we have increased dramatically, particularly in orthopaedic surgeries and surgeries, such as spinal surgeries.”
Dix added that the health ministry does take steps to ensure surgeries are not delayed or cancelled but they want to ensure that the surgeries are conducted in the safest possible manner.
“But I’ll personally investigate the circumstances involving this family and the circumstances they face,” he added.
Lavoie said she knows how difficult working in the health-care field can be, as she works in health care, but she said something has to be done.
“I’ve spent thousands of dollars two years in a row to accommodate this,” she said. “I’m financially stressed and stretched to the point I have nothing left. And that’s a Merry Christmas for me. So it’s a huge burden. And to find out that it was basically an administration issue because the right hand can’t talk to the left about figuring out whether there’s a better support staff for it is criminal in my mind. Somebody should have to be accountable, but no one is.”
Lavoie said there is no financial compensation when something like this happens.
“I’m going to be bankrupt. I’m going to have to because I can’t afford to do this constant yoyo back and forth,” she added. “And they do not consider that.”
However, she said the worst thing of all is that her son has become numb to the whole process.
“My son is so numb to it that he won’t even talk to me about it because what’s the point? He says it’s no point. He can’t wish for something because the wish is never coming.”