After a more than eight-hour wait at one emergency department in St. John’s, and a wild ride across the city to a second one, Paul Reid saw his heart monitor go berserk before he lost consciousness.
The next thing he remembers is looking up and seeing a large man above him.
“Who’s that up there? What’s he doing up there? He’s back up there again. What’s he doing up there?” said Reid.
“I flatlined. The nurse, luckily, was a six-foot, strapping man and he was on top of me giving me CPR. I came to a couple of times and I could see him and I knew I wasn’t seeing the lord.”
Reid’s describing what happened to him at St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital on June 14, 2023. He’s thankful for the nurse who was part of the team that resuscitated him. He’s had heart surgery and recovered well. But, he said, the events that led up to his crisis were unacceptable.
“I had waited eight and a half hours in the ER. I ended up leaving the Health Sciences Centre and going to St. Clare’s. I survived, but I had some trouble dealing with the situation. It took me about a year to get over it,” he said.
He’s speaking out now after hearing a St. John’s emergency doctor tell CBC News that someone is going to die in an ER if the problem of hospital overcrowding isn’t addressed quickly.
“I heard that and I thought, ‘hang on, it has happened.’ It happened to me,” he said.
Reid, who worked as a quality engineer in the offshore oil and gas industry for three decades, used the health authority’s complaints and compliments process after his experience.
“I wanted to use my experience to help improve the health-care system. I didn’t really think that process was as significant as I thought it might be. I got the feeling that they just wanted me to go away,” he said.
‘I’m in trouble’
Reid’s story began decades earlier. He said his father’s family is “riddled” with heart disease, and his mother and siblings died young. Reid also had a heart attack in 2007.
So in June 2023, when he had pain that radiated down his arm, he worried something was seriously wrong.
“I’d been dealing with what I thought were indigestion pains for a number of years, and I’m sure they were angina attacks and I just paid no attention to them,” he said.
“But this one morning I had several. I knew something was coming on and we were shopping and the pain went up … my neck, out my shoulders, down my arms and I said to the wife ‘we got to go to the hospital. We have to go now. I’m in trouble.'”
Inside the Health Sciences Centre emergency room Reid was given a blood test to look for signs of a heart attack.
I had a real lonely, helpless feeling that I’m on my own and if something were to happen to me, there’s nothing anybody is going to do for me.– Paul Reid
He said he waited for more than an hour and then asked hospital staff if his results were back. Reid said he was told they forgot to put in his blood work, and that they would right away and asked him to wait.
Reid said that after more than eight hours he approached the ER window. He said that when no one responded, he opened a door into a room where hospital staff were working.
He said he was admonished for opening the door and was told there was nothing they could do for him as there were no monitored beds. He was told to return to the waiting room.
He said he was also given the results of his blood work which confirmed he was “having a heart attack.”
“I said, ‘It looks like you’re not really going to do anything for me here’ and I took off my armband and I put it on the table. I said, ‘I’m going home out of it.’ I started walking out. The wife followed me. She said ‘there’s no way you’re going home. I’m taking this to St. Clare’s.'”
A wild drive
Reid said they drove across the city, running red lights along the way in an effort to make it to St. Clare’s before the situation worsened.
When they arrived at the emergency department, Reid was asked to wait again. After some time, he said, he pleaded with hospital staff to help him.
“I expressed my concerns, maybe with a few superlatives, and [a nurse] tended to me rather quickly,” Reid said, adding he was offered aspirin to chew.
“She gave me three blasts of nitroglycerin and said ‘I’m moving you to a monitored bed within the ER.’ I was there about twenty minutes, and I remember lights flashing, bells dinging and seeing that heart rhythm just kind of go and off I went.”
Reid says his heart stopped, that he died briefly, but was resuscitated. When he returned home there was a long period of recovery.
“I spent four months on the couch. It was a long time of thought. I had a real lonely, helpless feeling that I’m on my own and if something were to happen to me, there’s nothing anybody is going to do for me,” he said.
Formal complaint
Eventually, Reid filed a formal complaint, not because he was angry, he said, or that he wanted to lay blame, but to help find ways to improve care.
He said he received responses from the province’s health authority, but recent CBC News reports about a death at Carbonear’s emergency department and a physician’s call for change left him questioning if real improvements had ever been made.
A St. John’s man who had a heart attack after waiting more than eight hours in two emergency rooms is calling for changes to improve care and reduce wait times. The CBC’s Mark Quinn reports.
“The problem of long wait times in the ER is what, 20 or 30 years old?” said Reid.
“Think about that. People have spent their entire careers within that system of excessive wait times and nothing has changed. I mean, as a quality practitioner, that’s mind boggling to me that something can be … so systematically wrong and nothing happened to it.”
CBC News asked Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services to respond to Reid’s concerns. The health authority acknowledged the request through an email, but issued nothing after.
Reid also received an email from an official with the health authority dated Feb. 10. CBC News reviewed that email.
“I understand a thorough review of your health-care experience did take place via the Patient Relations Office,” the email reads, from an official whose name and position were redacted by Reid.
The email went on to list a number of corrective actions:
- An apology for the experience of care in the ER,
- A root cause analysis that identified three problems and work for a solution,
- Education completed with all staff regarding the use of the chest pain risk assessment tool and the use of chest pain medical direction,
- Adoption of a new chest pain risk assessment tool,
- Chart audits to ensure compliancy upon patients’ presentation to triage,
- and discussion with staff to improve patient-centred communications.
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