‘Sicker and sicker every day’: Sask. woman pushes gov’t for help as she waits on surgery

Nearly as long as Saskatchewan has been dealing with the pandemic, Stephanie Brad has been waiting for surgery to get her bladder removed.

“I’m getting sicker and sicker every day,” said Brad.

She and her husband Mike went to the legislative building from Domremy, south of Prince Albert, at the behest of the Saskatchewan NDP.

Brad explained she has been dealing with this situation for 11 years as her bladder tissue was deteriorating. She finally had surgery scheduled for April 2020, then the pandemic happened and the healthcare system was slowed down for the first time under COVID.

“Meanwhile I continued to get worse and worse and had to turn to some powerful pain meds to get through the days,” said Brad.

She had another date set for October, but again it was cancelled because of COVID’s effect on the healthcare system. She said her surgeons tried to get her surgery classified as emergent or urgent, but didn’t succeed.

Brad said she has no idea when her surgery might happen and, these days, she mostly just lies in bed in pain.

“I just want to have my surgery and every day that I end up back in the ER, the health-care providers – the doctors, the surgeons – just keep looking at me saying, ‘You know, there’s nothing we can do for you until you get this surgery,’ ” she said.

Brad’s case is more difficult than some because the procedure would take about eight hours in the operating room with her spending 10 to 14 days in the hospital. She said if it were a smaller surgery, it might be easier to find a date for her, but even still, she calls the surgery essential and life-changing.

“I’ve waited long enough – it’s time for me to get better, it’s time for me to get back to my kids, it’s time for me to get back to work,” explained Brad.

Brad held a picture of her four daughters briefly as she talked to the media. She said the illness and wait haven’t just affected her, it has affected her family too. Her oldest has become a de facto parent to her other kids, cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping.

“But she should be living her life at 18,” Brad said. “She should not be my caregiver.”

Brad said her 10-year-old suffers from severe anxiety, worrying about her mother. And her three-year-old has to be sent to daycare because Brad doesn’t have the ability to take care of her.

While Brad waits, being told that because the healthcare system is too busy with COVID she can’t get her surgery yet, she watches how the government has been handling the pandemic.

Brad’s surgery was cancelled in October, but the day it was supposed to happen, the 23rd, there was a concert in Saskatoon with thousands of people attending.

“That’s a little bit of a slap in the face: ‘Hey, it’s not safe for you to have your surgery because we don’t have the people to do it, but yeah, go to a concert,’ ” she pointed out.

She asks why the government waited so long to bring back masks, why it’s allowing big gatherings and why there aren’t any gathering limits right now.

“Why are we pushing so much to go back to normal life when we’re very clearly not there?” asked Brad.

Health Minister Paul Merriman said he understands Brad’s frustration but the government is working on getting surgeries back as quickly as possible. If he were to talk to Brad, Merriman said he would tell her something similar to what he has told others in that situation.

“We didn’t want to have to make the decisions to be able to slow down services and pause some services, but we had to protect the overall health-care system because there were just too many people that were unvaccinated coming in and in order to make sure our system didn’t crash we had to make these adjustments,” Merriman said. “But we’re restarting them as soon as possible.”

The health minister said the government has managed to move 90 per cent of those healthcare workers who were eligible back to their original positions. He also said some of those pulled out of the surgical sector are still needed in the ICUs.

Merriman said he wants to get surgeries back to 100 per cent capacity or more in the next month or so.

Among the avenues Merriman is exploring to deal with the surgery backlog is using public money to get people their surgeries in the private sector.

“I’ve asked my officials and the SHA to get that done as soon as possible – now understanding that it took us 20 months to get here, we can’t dig out of that – plus we had some surgeries that were delayed prior to COVID. It’s going to take us some time to get back there,” said Merriman.

NDP Leader Ryan Meili isn’t thrilled with that idea, saying he’s deeply concerned about anything that goes down the road of people getting a bill for essential services.

“There are things we can do to get on top of this surgical backlog, (but) going down the road of privatizing those services, user pay for those services, it won’t work. It has been shown around the world to actually increase wait times in public services. It’s also not fair,” said Meili.

Some of the things Meili thinks can be done are working with nurses and working to increase inpatient capacity.