Some might consider Doreen Tompkins lucky because she’s not in a wheel chair. Neither does she have a catheter.
But it’s the absence of those two conditions that are keeping her from being considered an ‘emergency’. And it’s those conditions that are the reason she should expect a seven to nine month wait to have the bladder x-ray her surgeon says is necessary before he can operate.
Until then, she’ll have to stay in bed waiting for the phone call.
“I just don’t understand,” Tompkins says, shaking her head. “My doctor has done everything he can do, and so has the surgeon. And I’m sure that the people who do the testing are doing everything they can” to see she gets her appointment as quickly as possible.
Tompkins began her wait last November when her doctor told her she needed a bladder repair. She met with a surgeon who’ll do the job, “but he told me he needed two things: First an x-ray of the bladder, and second an ultra sound.” The drawback, he added, was the wait. It’d be seven to nine months before she could have the necessary x-ray.
Extreme abdominal pain has made sure Tompkins follows her doctor’s orders. And it’s meant she’s had to be hospitalized several times for intravenous painkillers. She’s also on an oral painkiller, but what once worked for eight hours is only doing the job for six.
Last month she went back to see her surgeon, and was encouraged when he called the facility where she’ll have her x-ray, and was told “I’d be in in another month.”
That was Feb. 13. And as she marks off another week on her calendar, Tompkins can only shake her head.
“I bet if I was Ralph Klein’s wife I’d have had the surgery I need,” she says. That’s precisely what she added to her Letter to the Editor that Tompkins’ husband sent to newspapers and politicians’ offices across the province last week.
“How many of us are there with our lives on hold, waiting for our magic number to come up?”

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