It took forty hours of waiting, one night on the emergency room floor and two hospitals before Maryse Schinck was told that she had a perforated appendix and was operated on.
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The woman went on the evening of January 5, in pain, to the Anna-Laberge Hospital in Châteauguay, where no one offered her an ultrasound, she said.
“I was made to wait for hours and hours,” laments Ms. Schinck, now recovering.
What she is offered when she struggles to move is Tylenols and Manox every four hours, she says.
“I spent the night on the ground, writhing in pain,” she says, only to be told in the morning that another 30 hours would be needed before a doctor saw her.
This prospect pushes her to find help at the Barrie Memorial Hospital in Ormstown, in Montérégie, where 11 hours of waiting are still necessary before an ultrasound, which confirms that she will have to be operated.
The unfortunate epic of Maryse Schinck does not stop there, since she will have to wait another night before being transferred to another hospital where a specialist can operate on her.
Questioned by TVA Nouvelles, Bernard Cyr, the deputy director general of the CISSS de la Montérégie-Ouest, assures us that it was the “most difficult day of the holiday season”.
Mr. Cyr also recognizes that the situation experienced by Ms. Schinck “is absolutely not acceptable” and would like to “apologize to this patient, but also to her family.”
This is the second time this week that we learned that a patient had to sleep on the floor of an emergency room.
Over the past 10 days, occupancy rates in emergency rooms in the province of Quebec are around 130%.
