During a five-day stay at Fredericton’s Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital following surgery to treat their colon cancer, Maggie Lyons-MacFarlane said the food at the hospital made them feel “miserable” and “nauseous.”
Lyons-MacFarlane had recently changed their diet to include more vegetables, less red meat and less sugars.
They did this after finding documentation online, including from the Canadian Cancer Society, that indicated those changes would be helpful for someone living with colon cancer.
“During the surgery in March, that was a real struggle,” they said in an interview.
“To come out of surgery and be met with nothing but beef broth, sugars, Ensure that was sickly sweet … there was Jello, nothing on that tray didn’t have sugar in it except the black tea.”
They brought up their concerns with hospital staff and were told changes to the menu weren’t possible.
“The surgeon at the time said there was no link with diet and … let’s get this over with,” they said.
In an e-mailed statement, Jeff Carter, Horizon Health Network’s vice-president of capital assets, operations and infrastructure, said menus are “developed based on clinical guidelines, best practices, and can be individualized based on patient needs.”
“We work diligently to ensure that mealtimes matter and that nutritional needs are met in the way that the individual requires,” Carter said, encouraging patients with specific dietary needs to communicate them to health-care workers.
When they brought up the research they had done about their dietary needs, Lyons-MacFarlane said their doctor “wasn’t interested in hearing it.”
Their wife Nicki Lyons-MacFarlane then decided to take matters into their own hands and bring in their own food for Maggie after checking with hospital staff that that was allowed.
“I brought in healthier yogurts, and healthier protein shakes and things that weren’t loaded with sugars,” Nicki Lyons-MacFarlane said.
“I made sure they had stuff in the hospital that (Maggie) could eat that wouldn’t make them sick.”
Maggie regularly goes to the hospital for a few hours at a time for chemotherapy treatments, at which time they are served hospital food they say they can’t eat.
Nicki has taken it upon themselves to spend each Sunday preparing meals Maggie can eat while at the hospital, and while continuing chemotherapy treatments at home.
“I kind of put a couple things on the back burner to make sure we have time for this, because (Maggie) is more important than anything else that’s going on,” Nicki said.
Both Maggie and Nicki want to see changes in the system.
“It would be so much easier if Mags could go in (the hospital) especially for treatment days, and just have healthy nutritious food. Not just Mags but everybody else in the room,” Nicki said.
Maggie said they want Horizon and Vitalité to re-evaluate hospital food and look to other provinces for best practices.