Letter to the Editor

On Saturday morning, September 21 while alone at our property in the Rockies, I was woken up with a pain around 3 a.m. that felt like it could be in my back or maybe my abdomen. The pain was tolerable so I proceeded to break camp and loaded up an 8’ x 12’ x 3’ trailer with split firewood and headed home to Kimberley.

As I got closer to home, my pain was increasing and I realized that it was the result of a kidney stone and that could spell trouble because I had lost my other kidney to cancer a few years ago.

The following is a letter of gratitude to those who treated me [NB. I considered not writing this at a time when there is a looming election for fear that wing bats might misinterpret what I have to say as a political statement – it is not.]

Below is what transpired:

My wife Debbie drove me to the hospital and at the check in desk, despite the advice of my wife (why is she always right?) I downplayed the level of my pain for fear of being labelled another male who doesn’t understand what real pain is since I haven’t given birth; this was a mistake on my part because the medical team did not recognize the magnitude of my situation. However, it soon became clear that my pain level reached a point that I needed pain killers or a gun to shoot myself with.

Quickly after that point, Dr. Hadiuk and her team kicked in to high gear and pulled a technician in from home to do a CT Scan. Shortly after that, and a few shots of morphine later, I was told that I had an 8 x 10 kidney stone that was completely blocking my urinary trac and that an air ambulance was being ordered for transport to Kelowna. I did not realize at that time that my life expectancy was being measured in hours and minutes rather than days, weeks and months.

A paramedic team from Kimberley (I knew them both) arrived around midnight and transported me to the airport where we were met with an air ambulance that transported me to the Kelowna airport and on to the hospital.

In Kelowna, Dr. Ho had called in and assembled a medical team that performed an emergency surgery on me around 1:30 a.m. My times are approximate because of changed time zones and being sedated with pain killers. When I woke up after the surgery, my pain was gone outside of the catheter. Dr. Ho met with me early on Sunday morning and explained to me that if I had not received surgery when I did, my lone kidney was going to die and so was I – sobering information.

He had completed his whole surgery report by 7 a.m. the next morning and I had it on my phone in my health portal. Keep in mind that he was only the doctor on call and was probably brought in from home late the night before!

I was transported back to the EK Hospital via plane the next afternoon where I was in care until yesterday (Tuesday) and I got my firewood unloaded today.

My plan is to head out to our camp on Friday to go elk hunting and hope to be back country skiing, downhill skiing, light touring and riding my snowmachine once the snow flies. I might live to see another season.

I hear so much about a health care system that isn’t working and feel that it is important to acknowledge when it does work and for that I am in gratitude.

It would have been easy to write off 75-year-old as not worth the time to be saved but I didn’t get the feeling they looked at it that way.

It might be that I hit the system on the right sequence of days but I can say that everyone from the admissions nurse to those who gave me my wrist bands, to the nursing staff in the emergency ward, the cleaning staff, the doctors in the emergency ward, the paramedics from both Kimberley and Cranbrook, the pilots (it was nice to see males and females), the paramedics in Kelowna, the surgery staff working with Dr. Ho in Kelowna, the nurses, cleaning staff, the lab techs in Cranbrook, and the list goes on.

Through my old eyes, I saw people who looked like they wanted to be there, showed competency, acted professionally and made me feel that I was worth saving. To each and every one of you – Thank you.

Wayne Pelter,

Pig Pen Alley,

Kimberley

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