A woman who says she was repeatedly denied adequate emergency care last spring is blasting the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system, saying she’s been left psychologically scarred after being told several times that her gangrenous appendix was simply anxiety or constipation.

Joy Spence, 21, said she visited emergency departments at two hospitals in St. John’s over the course of nearly two weeks this May.

What began as weakness and abdominal pain on her right side quickly deteriorated into blacking out from the agony in her torso.

  • potate
    27·
    1 month ago

    Wow - I’m familiar with some of the issues of male bias in healthcare but this one was PARTICULARLY brutal.

    The (male) ER chief confidently stating that there is no bias but also that its hard to diagnose women was the absolute icing on the cake…

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    Fuck:

    She’s taken a year off her studies in Memorial University’s social work program and has lost her job. She’s looking for trauma therapy, but now doesn’t have the money to pay for it, she says.

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    the head of emergency departments for the St. John’s metro region rejects the allegation that women are being dismissed because of their gender within his hospitals, […] “We treat medical issues, not what your sex is, not what your age is … [everyone is] put through the process of triage assessment, disposition and follow-up advice. So everybody’s treated in the same way.”

    Translation: we misdiagnose everyone

    /s

    It’d be cool to see stats on this stuff. How many times do people have to return to the ER for the same problem? How long does it take to reach a resolution about individual issues? Anecdotally we know it’s bad, but how bad is it?

  • Nik282000
    7·
    1 month ago

    My gf complained of gal bladder like issues for over a year before a doctor finally stopped telling her it was heartburn and found that it was an inflamed gal bladder. Healthcare in Canada has gone to shit.

    A friend of mine moved here from India during covid and told me:

    If I wanted to die of preventable disease I would have stayed home.