The voice of the 18-year-old girl cracks in distress. She’s propped up on a hospital bed, eyes swollen from crying, lips stained red from bleeding lungs.
Laura went to Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton expecting to get better, cured even. Yes, the acute myeloid leukemia that nearly killed her five years ago was back but it was beatable.
And she couldn’t have been in better hands. Her own physician, Dr. Irwin Walker, is a Canadian pioneer of the stem cell transplant procedure Laura thought she would receive but never did.
Instead, for seven excruciating months until her death on Jan. 20, the teenager bore witness to one of the province’s most devastating health-care secrets, and died trying to do something about it.
Laura was one of hundreds of Ontarians tacked to the bottom of a too-long wait-list for the transplant procedure — a wait-list most patients didn’t know existed.
What follows is a raw account of how a public health-care system we consider among the world’s best failed Laura and many other patients like her.
The health ministry approved more than $100 million in spending recently to redirect hundreds of patients who will probably die waiting for transplants in Ontario to hospitals in Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. More than 200 cases have been outsourced since September, yet only 19 patients have made it there so far.
Walker had found a hospital trial in Duarte, Calif., that performed stem cell transplants on patients who were not in remission.
The hospital, City of Hope, agreed to take Laura if Walker could stabilize her for the trip.
On Christmas Eve, for the first time in weeks, Laura pushed herself to stand. She returned to the fourth-floor transplant ward to celebrate the new year.
With damaged abdominal organs and a weak heart, Laura still saw a way through the hell.
But in the nine days it took to finalize her hospital discharge papers and health ministry approval for the California transplant, Laura’s condition deteriorated.
The morning she was scheduled to fly to City of Hope, she awoke with a terrible migraine. Tests showed her brain was bleeding. Walker ordered a new chemo drug as a desperate measure to fight the mutating cancer but it didn’t help.
Laura went into cardiac arrest at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016. She died three hours later.
For starters, Cancer Care Ontario should begin tracking and disclosing wait times for transplants. Also, the public should know how many people die before getting to transplant. Adequate and immediate resources should be made available to boost operational costs, including staffing of stem cell transplant programs and even more basic acute leukemia services, where patients are now waiting weeks to begin their first round of chemotherapy.
“That is a potential death sentence,” Frances says.
“They say they can’t afford to fund these things in Ontario. Do you know how much money Laura cost the system because they didn’t do her transplant? Five rounds of infections, seven weeks in ICU, one-on-one nursing, countless imaging scans and bone marrow biopsies.
Dr. Hans Messner created Princess Margaret’s stem cell transplant program more than 40 years ago. In his 70s now, the hospital “dusted him off” recently from a three-month retirement to help fix the crisis.
“The big issue is that the funding has to be made available and soon,” he says. “I can tell you, for instance, we have worked very hard here to increase our transplant numbers by 25 per cent, without having any changes in our personnel. It’s not sustainable. Our transplanters, our nurses will burn out and that would make it worse.”
So where have the dollars gone?
more
Plea from dying teen: Please help | Toronto Star
Laura went to Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton expecting to get better, cured even. Yes, the acute myeloid leukemia that nearly killed her five years ago was back but it was beatable.
And she couldn’t have been in better hands. Her own physician, Dr. Irwin Walker, is a Canadian pioneer of the stem cell transplant procedure Laura thought she would receive but never did.
Instead, for seven excruciating months until her death on Jan. 20, the teenager bore witness to one of the province’s most devastating health-care secrets, and died trying to do something about it.
Laura was one of hundreds of Ontarians tacked to the bottom of a too-long wait-list for the transplant procedure — a wait-list most patients didn’t know existed.
What follows is a raw account of how a public health-care system we consider among the world’s best failed Laura and many other patients like her.
The health ministry approved more than $100 million in spending recently to redirect hundreds of patients who will probably die waiting for transplants in Ontario to hospitals in Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. More than 200 cases have been outsourced since September, yet only 19 patients have made it there so far.
Walker had found a hospital trial in Duarte, Calif., that performed stem cell transplants on patients who were not in remission.
The hospital, City of Hope, agreed to take Laura if Walker could stabilize her for the trip.
On Christmas Eve, for the first time in weeks, Laura pushed herself to stand. She returned to the fourth-floor transplant ward to celebrate the new year.
With damaged abdominal organs and a weak heart, Laura still saw a way through the hell.
But in the nine days it took to finalize her hospital discharge papers and health ministry approval for the California transplant, Laura’s condition deteriorated.
The morning she was scheduled to fly to City of Hope, she awoke with a terrible migraine. Tests showed her brain was bleeding. Walker ordered a new chemo drug as a desperate measure to fight the mutating cancer but it didn’t help.
Laura went into cardiac arrest at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016. She died three hours later.
For starters, Cancer Care Ontario should begin tracking and disclosing wait times for transplants. Also, the public should know how many people die before getting to transplant. Adequate and immediate resources should be made available to boost operational costs, including staffing of stem cell transplant programs and even more basic acute leukemia services, where patients are now waiting weeks to begin their first round of chemotherapy.
“That is a potential death sentence,” Frances says.
“They say they can’t afford to fund these things in Ontario. Do you know how much money Laura cost the system because they didn’t do her transplant? Five rounds of infections, seven weeks in ICU, one-on-one nursing, countless imaging scans and bone marrow biopsies.
Dr. Hans Messner created Princess Margaret’s stem cell transplant program more than 40 years ago. In his 70s now, the hospital “dusted him off” recently from a three-month retirement to help fix the crisis.
“The big issue is that the funding has to be made available and soon,” he says. “I can tell you, for instance, we have worked very hard here to increase our transplant numbers by 25 per cent, without having any changes in our personnel. It’s not sustainable. Our transplanters, our nurses will burn out and that would make it worse.”
So where have the dollars gone?
more
Plea from dying teen: Please help | Toronto Star