His family said they are still puzzled about why the original surgeon did not do the surgery. The second doctor said he needed quick intervention, and the surgery was done seven days after he fell, said Bélanger, an economics student at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Que. “I would wake up in the middle of the night crying and screaming in pain.” But staff told him the serious facial fractures his son suffered meant the surgery had to be performed in a hospital, he added.įour days of anguish since the surgery was cancelled had Bélanger managing “excruciating pain” with prescription opioids and morphine before his case was passed on to another surgeon, he said. Richard Bélanger said he went to the surgeon’s private clinic to provide information on the family’s insurance plan as well his credit card in case the surgery could be done there. “We were baffled about his basic rights as a Canadian,” he said, calling his son’s experience a “nightmare.” “We thought it was just completely absurd that I, with a broken face, was to take a commercial airline to go get a surgery done in my own country.”īélanger’s father and mother arrived in Kamloops later that week and tried unsuccessfully to speak with an administrator at the Interior Health authority about the best options for their son, Richard Bélanger said. He was given a window of 10 days before his facial bones would start to fuse.
“When he told me that the surgery couldn’t be done today, he suggested that I fly back to Quebec City to go get the surgery done,” Bélanger said. And I was calling my parents trying to figure out what to do.”īélanger said he offered to pay for the surgery through his family’s private insurance, but the surgeon rejected that option, saying he first needed to speak with a hospital administrator who was not available on the weekend.
I was still pretty out of it because I was in quite a bit of pain and on pain medications. Normally, you’d do the surgery and figure out billing afterwards, or at least I thought that’s what was going to happen,” he said. As I thought about it more, I thought that doesn’t make sense. “He said that the hospital would not let him do the surgery because I was from Quebec,” Bélanger said, adding he’d presented his provincial health card when he arrived at Royal Inland.
But Bélanger said that just as he was being prepared for the operating room, the surgeon cancelled the procedure. The following morning, he and his girlfriend, Beth Cooper, returned to the hospital for surgery. He was taken by ambulance to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops just before midnight and was told he needed surgery for a “broken face.” But a surgeon was not available on Saturday, so he was discharged with a prescription for the opioid-containing drug Percocet to manage his pain, Bélanger said. He tripped andstumbled backwards in the dark, hitting his face on a boulder.
Patrick Bélanger, 23, said his experience is a warning for residents of Quebec and all Canadians who take pride in a universal health-care system because doctors in other provinces could deny treatment to Quebecers by maintaining they won’t be compensated.īélanger’s ordeal began when he and his girlfriend were walking along a trail in the resort town of Sun Peaks, B.C., on the evening of June 10. VANCOUVER - A Quebec man who fell and broke his jaw, cheekbone and a bone around his left eye while visiting British Columbia says his surgery was cancelled after he was told his home province “won’t pay” for the procedure.
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