Four weeks ago, I almost lost my life while waiting for emergency care in a Calgary hospital. The ironic part of the story is that I always thought of Canada as having saved my life from the brutal Syrian dictatorship I fled more than 30 years ago. But never would I have thought that my life would be threatened in Canada—and certainly not in a Canadian emergency room.

On December 1, 2023, I was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy at Peter Lougheed hospital in Calgary. Today I am cancer free, yet to my surprise, the possible return of the disease is now the least of my worries.

Last month I was scheduled for a post-surgery follow-up appointment. While I sat in the physician’s office, accompanied by my daughter, discussing the details of my positive prognosis, I felt a sudden pinch in my chest, right where the mastectomy had been performed. The sharp pain then exploded in the form of a grape-sized protrusion that quickly grew into the size of a pear. Within about five minutes, the right side of my chest had swelled to the size of a watermelon. The pain was beyond excruciating—on a scale of one to ten, it felt like a 20.

My doctor quickly diagnosed me with hematoma as a result of a ruptured artery, a very rare post-op complication that I later learned he had never seen in his more than 25 years of practice. He wrapped my chest tightly to put pressure on the bleeding and told my daughter (age 26 and a soon-to-be-physician) that I would need immediate surgery. He then gave us two choices: to remain at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary (where his office was located) and be slotted in for an emergency operation—explaining that we would likely have to endure what would possibly be a longer wait time—or to get to Peter Lougheed hospital across town where my plastic surgeon would be waiting to perform immediate surgery.

The catch was this: if we chose to be in the care of my surgeon at Peter Lougheed, it would not be possible to get there by ambulance, since we were already in the vicinity of Foothills, and an ambulance could only transport us to the nearest hospital (Lougheed is more than 13 kilometres away).

I decided that I wanted to be under the care of the plastic surgeon who was already familiar with my mastectomy, as well as save myself the ER wait time at Foothills, so we were left with two options: either for my daughter to drive me in our own car to Peter Lougheed, or to call an Uber. Despite the obvious and severe pain I was exhibiting, my daughter was told that she could pull over and dial 911 if I became “unstable.” We chose to call an Uber.

This was the beginning of what became a journey to hell. A driver pulled up and, after seeing the state I was in, hesitantly agreed to take us to our destination. Sitting in the back seat of his compact sedan, my helpless daughter held my hand, constantly and anxiously assessing my stability, while I struggled to breathe because of the pain. The driver, a kind man who showed immense patience, repeatedly apologized for traffic that caused a cross-town trip of 35 minutes to feel like several years.

Upon arriving at Peter Lougheed, my panic-stricken daughter jumped out of the car to find a wheelchair. When she returned, the Uber driver left his car running and pushed me in the chair as fast as he could to the unit where a team was ready to prepare me for what we thought would be an immediate surgery. Meanwhile, my chest was growing bigger and bigger as the blood from the ruptured artery was leaking like a burst pipe. “My chest feels like it’s about to explode!” I yelled to the medical team, while my daughter and I watched in horror as fluid began seeping from my incision.

I was given IV opioids for pain control, but this did little to reduce the unimaginable pain (I am a mother of three children—all were natural deliveries). We waited and waited, not for an hour, not two, not three, but for six hours for the surgery to begin.

Today, as I pause to reflect with horror on that day, my most vivid memory is of my daughter’s petrified, tearful, red-shot eyes, staring at me helplessly, and of her chocked voice repeating, “It’s going to be okay, mama.”

The morning after the four-hour operation, I came to learn that I lost an estimated six units of blood. More terrifying, after the nurse changed my dressing, I discovered that the skin on my chest had been ripped apart, torn because of the wait I had endured as the swelling worsened (this also explains why the narcotics had little effect).

As I write this, four weeks after the incident, I am not able to move my right arm due to connective tissue trauma as a result of the hematoma. As we tried to understand what had happened, we were told that there was no operating room, nor an anesthesiologist who was available on that day (as it happens, I know of overqualified immigrant anesthesiologists who are forced to work as Uber drivers because Canada’s system of credential recognition is unfriendly to foreign medical professionals).

The bottom line is that waiting for emergency care in a Canadian hospital almost cost me my life. Now I am living a painful reality that would have been very different had I received timely care.

The excruciating physical pain that I endured that day has become a traumatic memory that haunts me with recurring nightmares. The mental scars and physical scars are deep, and they will take many years to heal.

Since my ordeal, I have come to learn that three patients have died waiting for emergency care at a Montréal hospital in the last three months alone. In January of this year, another patient died while waiting about five hours in the emergency department at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg.

My lived experience has brought me face-to-face with the crisis in the Canadian health care system, where wait times have risen sharply amid chronic staffing shortages. Emergency physicians in Alberta say wait times can exceed seven hours, while in Ontario, one in every 10 patients admitted to hospital from an emergency department waits at least two days before they get a bed. This same dire state of affairs generalizes across the country.

I am disheartened and angry, and I feel helpless. I am concerned, not only for myself and family, but for my friends, my neighbours, and our communities at large.

I am a Canadian citizen who ran for Parliament in the 2019 election. I have paid every penny of my costly share of Canadian taxes for decades and have done so with deep gratitude to a country that has offered a safe haven for me and my children. I am also a professor who has been privileged to teach our future generations and to contribute to the building of minds and spirits in our education system. But today, I stand deeply disappointed, harmed by a broken system that nearly cost me everything.

How many lives lost waiting for care are too many before change happens?

Ghada Alatrash is an assistant professor at the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary. She holds a PhD in educational research, languages and diversity from the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, and a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Oklahoma. Her current research focuses on Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.