“Our options were limited,” remarks the granddaughter who went with Matthew Mukash.
Jade Mukash never thought they would spend four days sitting in the emergency room hallway when she traveled to Montreal with her grandfather on January 7.
Matthew Mukash, a former grand chief of the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec, was positioned next to a glass partition near the emergency room door and expressed his inability to sleep.
“This is where I was put, right at the door. In a video that his son Pakesso Mukash recorded, Mukash declared, “I’m still here.”
“The room I was initially put in was rolled into by someone else. It’s really busy here, then. New faces popping up all the time,” he said, gesturing to the registration office four meters away.
When the 72-year-old began to lose weight and had problems moving around, he was taken to the Montreal General Hospital. He saw a nurse, had scans and blood work done overnight, and eventually needed to be admitted.
Jade Mukash claims she was informed that her grandfather would be moving into the hallway for a while.
“He wasn’t moved after that until he was discharged four days later,” Jade recalled.
“We were informed that all we had to do was wait for a room to open up. It was utterly needless.”
By telling their story, the family hopes to draw attention to other obstacles that some Cree and Inuit patients might encounter when traveling hundreds of kilometers south to receive medical attention in overflowing emergency rooms.
“I do feel like there needs to be more compassion for them and more patience,” Jade replied.
“To not just tell them that they must wait in line with everyone else.” And it’s true that you have to wait just like anyone else who visits the ER, but there was nowhere for us to go while my grandfather was in the ER lobby, according to Jade.
“Taking a taxi home is not an easy task. We’re taking a flight home. And that’s essentially the main distinction.”
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