Hospital stay | “You have a room”

Struggling with an immune system that has “gone crazy,” Emmy Vande Rosieren discovered from the inside the limits of an often overwhelmed healthcare system.

The black hole, this feeling that the world is sucking me in: this is how I found myself on a stretcher at the Montreal General Hospital, one Wednesday at midnight.

Triage, first step: you are given a priority code, a color which decides the severity of your condition. Here I am, seated in a wheelchair, relegated to a corner, alongside a woman who, looking livid, is painfully expelling her supper into a basin.

After 10 hours of waiting and some blood tests, a first doctor appears, or should I say an automaton? Could it be artificial intelligence that has taken over?

Everything is mechanical: every sentence seems calculated for effectiveness. I am given exams without a word of explanation. Another turn of the clock, then a gastroenterologist knocks on the door. Words that are intended to be reassuring fall from his lips: “You are too young for cancer, I doubt that’s it…” Reassuring, did I say? My stomach doesn’t seem to agree as it welcomes the descent of my heart. After 20 hours of waiting, a colonoscopy scheduled for the next day, I finally leave this place.

It is with a reassuring hand that the diagnosis falls: ulcerative colitis. I was prescribed the first treatments, no less than 13 pills per day!

Here I am back home, alone facing my pillbox and my diagnosis. The days pass, and my condition deteriorates. One Saturday morning, I woke up, unable to move, in the grip of a violent fever. My boyfriend has to carry me to the bathroom. The feeling of dying invades me, panic rises: will I make it until my appointment on Monday? According to 911, I have no choice.

Return to hospital

An empty shell is probably what I looked like when I arrived at the Montreal General Hospital. I wander the corridors in my wheelchair, pushed by my boyfriend who has the same dark circles as me. Again this reassuring hand: “We are going to hospitalize you. » A smile escapes me, quickly replaced by the disillusionment of what follows: a return to triage, waiting for a room.

A dry-spoken nurse takes over. Without a word, he brutally puts a catheter in me. He fails, starts again. My tears flow without restraint.

Bruises begin to appear on my skin, witnesses of time stretching endlessly. The blood loss is increasing, but still not a trace of a room. Fifteen hours later, a woman follows me to the toilet: “I’m the doctor, we’re going to talk. » Exhausted, my boyfriend breaks down: “We’ve been waiting for almost 20 hours, we need a room. » With chilling disdain, she retorts: “Look around you, everyone is waiting. » Two hours later, I was found a temporary outpatient room. Finally a little respite…

I’ve never excelled in the art of seduction, but when five departments show up in front of you, you have to roll up your sleeves and try to convince them to take you to their floor. “You are too young. » “You’re losing too much blood.” » These are the words released, almost innocently, by residents who, without knowing it, are still unaware of the impact that their words can have on a patient. After two days spent on a stretcher, between an improvised room and the crowded corridors of the hospital, the long-awaited words finally fell from the mouth of an old man: “You have a room, in internal medicine. » I come back to life, burning with impatience at the idea of ​​leaving this lightless basement. Goodbye, emergencies.

“Have you read my file? » These are the first words that pass my lips upon discovering the cubbyhole which serves as my room in internal medicine.

Four walls, no windows, and above all no toilet, for a patient who has to go there eight times a day to bleed out.

The nervous breakdown breaks out. Nurses and doctors go to war against the administration: how could such a situation happen?

A room finally becomes available, but here, good news for one often hides bad news for another. This time it belonged to an old man who had returned home for his final days. Thank you, unknown.

The following days were colored with infusions, transfusions and IVs. They explain to me that a version of me is being tested in the lab, in the hopes of stopping my immune system gone crazy. Meanwhile, my room becomes a hub of medical students. A real episode of Grey’s Anatomyexcept this time, the star patient is me.

A week later, I left with a new roommate for life: ulcerative colitis. Fortunately, I am armed with a treatment, infliximab, capable of preventing my own body from destroying itself. This experience, while marked by competent care, also confronted me with the limits of an overburdened public system, where each step becomes a test of endurance.

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