Grateful for task force’s help, recovering double hip-replacement patient fears for those still waiting

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This article was published 19/12/2023 (659 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As one of roughly 80 Manitobans who got in under the wire for an out-of-province surgery through Manitoba’s now-decommissioned surgical backlog task force, Judy Waytiuk doesn’t object to the task force being shut down.

But scrapping it without a backup plan, she said, leaves an untold number of people suffering with chronic pain and no end in sight to their deteriorating quality of life.

“I feel very badly for them. It’s tragic,” the south St. Vital resident said Tuesday, five days post-op on her cross-border hip replacement.

“There are I don’t know how many thousands of people who are sitting on their couches or in their chairs unable to live, and they’re going to have to suffer like that for a year, two years, three? Who knows? It’s horrible.”

Waytiuk had her first hip replacement in Fargo in August. Her second surgery, on her right hip, was confirmed in late October, less than a week before the Nov. 1 deadline set by the province to wind down operations on the cancelled diagnostic and surgical recovery task force.

She had the hip replaced Dec. 14 and is now recovering at home, minus the pain that plagued her for years.

“If I had not got this second one in just under the wire, I don’t know what I would’ve done, because it was just horrendous,” Waytiuk said, explaining that the pain had made it impossible for her to stand upright or be on her feet long enough to cook a meal. She couldn’t walk her three dogs, let alone participate in agility sports with them, which had been a favourite pastime.

“Even just a few days post-surgery, the only discomfort is sore muscles, and that’s minor. It’s so nothing compared to the right hip pain that was there, that I honestly feel like dancing down the street, practically. Although, of course I won’t, because I’m not supposed to for a few weeks,” she added with a laugh.

Even amid financial-mismanagement allegations from the NDP government about the task force commissioned by former premier Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservatives, Waytiuk said she had no reservations about arranging her surgery through the task force and heading to the U.S.

When she first learned she need hip replacements, Waytiuk was given a 32-month wait estimate. Agreeing to go across the border cut that wait time in half.

It makes sense for the provincial government to put money into building up local health-system capacity instead of spending millions of dollars on cross-border surgeries, Waytiuk said, but she expressed concern for Manitobans who are still waiting for a solution to chronic staff and surgical-space shortages.

“I can understand that completely. What I can’t understand is cancelling that out-of-province program before you have figured out what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it with the wait list here.”

The task force stopped collecting and publicly releasing provincial wait-time data in August, despite promises to launch a comprehensive, provincewide tracking system for all types of medical procedures before last fall’s provincial election.

As of August, there were 753 patients waiting for their scheduled hip replacements, and the median wait time was four months. For knee replacements, 2,184 patients were waiting in August. Those patient-volume numbers and wait-time data did not include Manitobans who know they need a joint replacement but whose surgeries hadn’t yet been scheduled.

The now-cancelled task force is supposed to stop operating at the end of this month, but out-of-province surgeries booked as of Nov. 1 will continue.

There are 79 patients scheduled to have surgeries or diagnostic tests out of province until the end of of March, as well as an additional eight patients who got in before the deadline but are still waiting for test results to confirm their eligibility to be sent elsewhere.

Political leaders and decision-makers may have an academic understanding of the true effects of long waits and chronic pain, but unless they’ve been through it, they’re missing a “gut-level comprehension,” Waytiuk said.

“They can see the numbers, and I think they realize that every one of those numbers represents a human being whose life is trashed. It’s not just hips. Across the board, the wait lists are obscene. So, I don’t know how they wrestle this octopus to the ground. I really, really don’t.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca