On Endurance as a Requirement for Care

On December 6th, 2024, I learned what it feels like to be forgotten by the healthcare system—not metaphorically, not rhetorically, but quite literally.

That morning, after more than fourteen hours of persistent, escalating pain from what I knew to be a gallbladder attack, I called 911. I had already taken two doses of an NSAID. They hadn’t touched the pain. Something was wrong.

An ambulance arrived at my home in under ten minutes. The three paramedics who attended to me were professional, attentive, and deeply human. If there is any group of public servants still holding the moral centre of our healthcare system, it is them. They treated me with urgency, dignity, and care—and then they brought me to St. Catharines General Hospital (otherwise known as the “Marotta Family Hospital”), where that care quietly unraveled.

The paramedics stayed with me on their stretcher in a hallway for nearly an hour before they were forced to leave. From the moment I called 911, I was told—by dispatch and later by hospital staff—not to eat or drink anything. I followed those instructions exactly.

After several hours on the ambulance stretcher, I was moved into the emergency waiting room and told to wait.

The pain did not plateau. It worsened.

Over the next several hours, I repeatedly asked three simple questions: Can I have something for the pain? Can I have some water? How long will it be before I’m seen?

Each time, I was dismissed. No pain relief was offered. I was advised not to drink water, but told—almost casually—that if I wanted any, I could purchase it from the vending machine.

So I waited.

For eight hours, I sat in the emergency room watching dozens of people—many of whom arrived well after I did—be called in, treated, and discharged. By this point, I was visibly deteriorating. Other patients noticed. Strangers advocated for me when I no longer had the energy to do so myself.

After eight hours in the waiting room, other patients—concerned by my visible decline—approached the registration desk to ask why I had still not been seen.

What followed was not a misunderstanding. Staff at the desk acknowledged that my case had stalled entirely. I was told that they had “forgotten about me.” That they were “using a new system.” That my file “may have been lost.“

This was not a delay of minutes. It was hours—hours during which my condition went unmonitored, my pain untreated, and my presence effectively erased from the process meant to care for me.

Within thirty minutes of that admission, I was taken into the treatment area—only to be told to wait another thirty minutes. It was now around midnight. I had been in the hospital for thirteen hours. I had not seen a doctor. I had received no pain medication. The only thing I had consumed was a single 500ml bottle of water that cost $2.50 from a vending machine.

Blood work finally came next. The nurse was kind, but as she struggled to draw blood, she remarked that I was likely dehydrated—and that I should have been drinking more water.

This, after a full day of being explicitly told not to drink anything.

By the time I finally saw a doctor—approximately fourteen hours after arriving—she confirmed what I already knew: I was having a gallbladder attack. Imaging was ordered. That was it. No pain relief. No referral to a surgeon. No advice for managing the condition in the short or long term.

Fourteen hours in agony.
Fourteen hours in a cold waiting room.
Fourteen hours to be told what I had known before I ever called 911.

This is not a story about one bad shift, or one overwhelmed nurse, or one bureaucratic error. This is what system failure looks like at ground level. It looks like patients falling through cracks wide enough to swallow them. It looks like pain being normalized, dehydration being blamed on the patient, and accountability dissolving behind the phrase “we’re doing our best.”

I am not angry at frontline workers. They are exhausted and stretched past reason. I am angry at a system that asks them to function under impossible conditions—and then expects patients to absorb the consequences quietly.

Residents of St. Catharines deserve better than a healthcare system where being forgotten is a plausible outcome of seeking emergency care. We deserve transparency. We deserve triage systems that do not erase people. We deserve pain to be treated as real, and dignity to be treated as non-negotiable.

What happened to me was not an anomaly—it was the predictable outcome of a system under strain, administered by the Niagara Health System, where failures of process quietly become failures of care.

I’m sharing this not because my experience was unique, but because it wasn’t. Because too many people in St. Catharines have a version of this story, told quietly, after the fact, once the pain has passed or the damage is done.

A healthcare system should not rely on patients—or strangers in a waiting room—to notice when someone has been forgotten. It should not require endurance, luck, or self-advocacy just to be seen.

If we don’t speak honestly about what is happening inside our hospitals, nothing changes. And if this feels familiar, that should trouble all of us.

• On Endurance as a Requirement for Care
• On Efficiency as a Substitute for Democracy
• On The Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism
• On Portraits Beyond Faces
• On My Fight with the NRPS