"ER and Admission Times"

My late wife was suffering greatly from advanced Stage 4 metastasized melanoma in her brain and lungs in summer 2025. The biggest problem was the large tumour in her right frontal lobe which was causing loss of dexterity, nausea/vomiting, headaches and focal seizures. While attempting to taper one medication; to enable to continue immunotherapy treatments,  she crashed hard mid-summer 2025. On advice from her excellent oncologist, Dr. Cheng, I attempted to increase home-administered oral dosages of prescribed medications, but her nausea was so severe that she vomited up these medications after short periods and I was uncertain as to what amounts of these medications, if any, had been absorbed prior to her puking them up.

The symptoms became increasingly intolerable with headaches at 11/10 levels and that afternoon she was taken by ambulance to Foothills ER in distress. The on-call oncologist had been alerted and was waiting for us at ER. However we were advised that she would need to be cleared by the admission doctor prior to receiving expert help from the waiting oncologist. And so we waited. What was required was IV medications as the partially effective oral medications that I had administered started to wear off. After about 2 hours, I asked the triage nurse what were we waiting for? The response was that the ER doctor needed to approve passing her care along to the waiting oncologist and they would need to see her bloodwork first. I then asked when those blood samples might be taken? After I asked that, the blood samples were taken.

And so we waited while her pain was increasing. To complicate matters, upon further polite inquiries my daughter and I were advised that the admissions doctor was too busy attending to other patients. This to me sounds like a broken system of admission while needy patients with expert help waiting are forced to wait.

After 9 hours of needless waiting in agonizing pain and while expert help was standing-by, she was finally admitted to Arthur Child in the late evening where she received excellent treatment and the necessary IV drugs were quickly administered and her pain was finally treated.

While totally lucid and pain free the next day at the Arthur Child she demanded that we contact MAID to administer her pre-approved medically assisted death as quickly as possible. This was done compassionately by Dr. Wong.  Her ordeal was finally over.

After several months, my anger has partially subsided regarding the very poor way she was treated in Foothills ER for a third occasion. My main objective is to collaboratively facilitate process improvements to the antiquated and procedure bound admissions process that ignores patient care and forces undue waiting in ER/Admissions while expert care is waiting behind closed doors. Surely there must be a way to by-pass the Foothills ER chaos under these circumstances so that other needy patients are not treated in what I feel is a callous manner in future.

While this is a band-aid that should help a few patients to avoid the ineffective and procedure bound ER/Admissions process, one has to wonder if a more comprehensive teardown and rebuild of the entire ER/Admissions process may be required to improve the rating of this department that has an embarrassingly poor online rating and is a blemish on the otherwise very good care available at Foothills and particularly the excellent care available at Arthur Child.  One also has to wonder if what I perceive was an erroneous diagnosis earlier in the year could have been avoided if the ER/admissions process was better and there was more time available to help needy patients.