One of the victims in last week's stabbing melee in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is speaking out about the bloody attack – and asking why despite her five stab wounds she was sent home from hospital early.

Vancouver Coastal Health is apologizing that staff sent the 48-year-old woman in a cab back to a run-down Downtown Eastside hotel with regular rodent infestations and rat feces.

“I’m very much in pain, still traumatized, at how the hospital could have treated me like that. I was almost dying, then sent out onto the curb, basically,” said Natalie, who CTV News is identifying using only her first name because she remains scared after the attack.

Natalie was one of three people stabbed Thursday on Hastings Street by a man who waved a knife and confronted several people.

Surveillance video obtained by CTV News from the Lime Life Society shows the attacker first slicing at someone carrying a bike, then fighting with two other men in a brawl that spilled onto the street.

After the attacks, the man – since identified by authorities as 26-year-old Edmontonian Abdi Gani Mahamud Hirsi – purposefully strides west towards Gore Street.

Natalie was standing at the First United Church at the time, and said she was curious about the commotion on Gore Street and went to investigate. She accidentally dropped a $20 bill, reached to pick it up and then saw a man lunging at her.

She says the man stabbed her five times: twice in the right hand, twice in the left arm, and once in the top of her head.

That’s when gunshots from police took him down.

“His head fell right on top of me. All I saw was his white eyes. [He looked like] a devil. A demon. A zombie. The blood was gushing on me,” Natalie said.

She wants to thank the police officers who saved her life, and the paramedics who brought her to the hospital. But three days later, she was surprised when her care team said she would be sent home.

“I almost died out there and then being sent out I can’t even wash myself,” she said.

Her advocate with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre said the hospital shouldn’t have sent her back to her room at a Downtown Eastside single-room occupancy hotel.

“She was released to a place where there are very bad conditions. It’s very run down, it’s not maintained. There is often rat feces and it’s an unkempt building,” said Liza McDowell.

The Women’s Centre pushed for her to get a transition bed at a different Vancouver Coastal Health facility downtown, where she is healing now.

Gavin Wilson of Vancouver Coastal Health says the agency is now reviewing what happened. Normally, he said, a social worker on the care team would notice a patient’s substandard living condition and work out a better discharge plan.

“We would have to apologize,” he said. “I think it’s an unacceptable level of care that was given to her. We let her down.”