‘I pretty well would have died on the operating table’: Canadian patient shares ordeal on long wait list for colonoscopy

A new report from SecondStreet.org says nearly 75,000 Canadians have died waiting for various health services. (Pexels)

Joan Hama says she nearly died because she waited months longer than she should have for a colonoscopy.

While the best practice was to get the colonoscopy within 60 days, the 68-year-old woman said she was put on an eight-month wait list, which delayed her colon cancer diagnosis eight years ago.

About four months during the waiting period, she said she felt excruciating stomach pain. Her colon had ruptured and she had to undergo emergency surgery. The surgeon removed the cancerous growth and she had to be resuscitated numerous times during the procedure, she said.

“If the colon cancer could have been caught initially, I wouldn’t have this huge scar running down my stomach,” the retired financial planner from West Kelowna, B.C., said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday, tearing up at times as she talked about the “pain and difficulty” of recovering after the surgery.

“I pretty well would have died on the operating table,” she added. “I still get upset about this ... It took me about two years to finally start recovering.”

Wait-list tragedies

While Hama survived and is cancer-free today, thousands of other Canadians in similar situations didn’t make it.

Nearly 75,000 Canadians have died waiting for various types of health services, from cancer treatment to MRI scans, since 2018, according to government data released by the non-profit, public policy think tank SecondStreet.org.

“Thousands of Canadians across the country find themselves on waitlists — in some cases for several years — with too many tragically dying before ever getting treated, or even diagnosed," Harrison Fleming, the Calgary-based legislative and policy director at SecondStreet.org, said in a press release Wednesday.

At least 15,474 patients in Canada died from 2023 to 2024 while waiting for a wide range of surgeries, procedures or diagnostic scans, such as heart operations, hip operations and cataract surgeries, the data showed. The figure doesn’t include Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, and most of Manitoba. SecondStreet.org said Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries.

SecondStreet.org says the number is incomplete because several governments don’t track the problem or only provided partial data.

Many government health-care bodies don’t track data about wait-list deaths, the think tank added.

It is calling for governments to “proactively” disclose the information like they do with health inspections for restaurants.

Other highlights of findings

- SecondStreet.org estimates the number of patients who died last year was nearly double at about 28,077 patients if the data includes provinces and health regions that didn’t provide data.

- In some cases, patients died after less than a week to more than 14 years waiting for treatment, though SecondStreet.org said “some response data is vague.”

- New Ontario Health data suggests 378 patients died while waiting for cardiac surgery or a cardiac procedure.

Data collection

SecondStreet.org says it obtained the data from provincial governments and their health authorities from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, through freedom of information requests.