Surgeons had to remove three feet of dead tissue from a colon cancer patient’s small bowel after staff at a Canadian hospital waited seven days for life-saving surgery, the Vancouver Sun reported.
Jill Hoskyn, a 56-year-old North Delta resident, spent a month in the Surrey Memorial Hospital in British Columbia, recovering from the April 1 surgery, which doctors delayed in favor of watchful monitoring for a few days. Although she agreed to wait, Hoskyn began begging for surgery when the pain became too much.
"Our kids are always our kids,” Marjorie Robinson, Hoskyn’s mother and a retired nurse, said. “I was there sitting with her every day and she was in so much pain, and hallucinating from the morphine drugs, and she was desperate to get the surgery."
Hoskyn could not eat solid food for weeks before, then after the surgery, and lost nearly 25 percent of her weight. She also had to stop radiation and chemotherapy treatments because of her weak physical state, making her prognosis uncertain.
“Seven weeks post-op, our daughter is still struggling to recover," Robinson said.
Dr. Peter Blair, medical director of the Fraser Health region surgical program, doubts that the delay in treatment was the reason Hoskyn had to remain in the hospital for a month after surgery, even though he was surprised by the length of time.
"Unscheduled patients are all vying for operating room time and so they must be prioritized by surgeons. Having said that, I'm not faulting the surgeon at all," Blair said.
Apparently, neither does Hoskyn, who said she knows her surgeon did his best to get her into the OR.
Hoskyn was diagnosed with colon cancer last August, and classified with stage III cancer last October.
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