Patient was in terrible pain lying in hallway
Jim Sanford’s family is haunted by the roughly 27 hours he spent in an overcrowded Hamilton emergency department.
They describe the pancreatic cancer patient deteriorating rapidly, particularly during the four hours he spent begging for pain relief on an ambulance stretcher that was too small for him.
They were terrified he would die in that hallway just inside the emergency room doors lined with ambulance stretchers.
“What my husband went through and what we went through as a family,” said his widow Doreen Sanford. “If we had known that was the way it was going to be, he would have been at home where he wanted to be.”
They question whether the 70-yearold retired east Hamilton truck driver would have lived a little bit longer and died at home as he wished if he hadn’t gone by ambulance to Juravinski Hospital on Oct. 5.
Either way, they are distressed to think a palliative patient spent one of his last days in a congested emergency department feeling scared and undignified and crying in pain.
“He should not have had to lie on a stretcher that was too small for him in the hallway just inside the door in the pain he was in,” said his wife. “An emergency is an emergency. It shouldn’t be waiting forever.”
The family doesn’t blame the paramedics, the hospital or the emergency department staff. They point the finger directly at provincewide hospital overcrowding that has left all of Hamilton’s adult acute-care hospitals with more patients than beds.
“We have been operating at over capacity for over a year,” said Dr. Wes Stephen in an interview about overcrowding at Hamilton Health Sciences.
Juravinski has been particularly hard hit, running close to 110 per cent occupancy or higher for a year.
“Hospital staff and physicians have been working hard to maintain care and patient experience,” said Stephen, executive vice-president of clinical operations.
Sanford’s family describe him as walking, talking and joking that morning when he fell for the second time in 24 hours, injuring his leg. He couldn’t get up on his own and his family called emergency services when they couldn’t lift the 330pound father of four and grandfather of seven.
They say he reluctantly agreed to go to hospital around 1:30 p.m. because paramedics were concerned about his breathing and pain.
The closest hospital was too full to accept ambulances so his family chose Juravinski because he was a cancer patient.
“It was so packed,” said his daughter Jodie Moyano. “We were just inside the doors. If we moved, the doors opened again. It was full of stretchers.”
They say he was embarrassed by the lack of privacy.
“It was chaotic,” said his wife. “He was bigger than the stretcher so he was always afraid he was going to fall. He wasn’t comfortable. He couldn’t breath and he was in pain. For four hours he sat there hanging on.”
During those hours, they say he declined to the point that medical staff told them he could die soon.
“He went in waving at the mailman and at that four-hour mark he was no longer able to speak,” said Moyano. “We saw this crazy decline in his cognitive awareness. He was crying in pain.” When they couldn’t stand it any longer, the family says they gave him medication from home until paramedics provided intravenous pain relief at about the threehour mark.
After he was finally admitted to the emergency department, it was at first to a busy curtained off area that the family says wasn’t much better than the hallway.
“It was so crowded, it just felt stifling,” said Moyano. “It was in the middle of everything. He wasn’t properly positioned in the bed and it was really just another stretcher.”
After roughly another three hours, he was moved to a hospital bed in a quieter part of the department. By this time, the family describes being desperate to get him out of the overcrowded emergency room before he died there.
He was transferred to a palliative care bed at St. Peter’s Hospital around 5 p.m. the day after he arrived at Juravinski.
His death four days after his emergency arrival was peaceful, but his family can’t help but dwell on those earlier 28 hours.
“He didn’t want to go to the hospital,” said his wife.
“It would have been one thing to be put into a bed, given pain meds and be looked after. But to go through that, I just can’t deal with that.”