Canadian Single Payer Pain: Second senior says she had cataract surgery without sedation

Toronto Star reports:

Prone to anxiety attacks, 65-year-old Fern Cooper suffered a particularly bad one a couple of weeks ago. She was undergoing cataract surgery on her right eye at Oakville Trafalgar Hospital, but without sedation.

She felt like she was suffocating while covered by a surgical drape sheet, with only an opening for her eye, she says. Trying to get more air under the sheet, she kept raising an arm. An anesthetist kept putting it back down.

“(Imagine) having to lay perfectly still while you watch the doctor bring a scalpel to your eyeball and then make an incision. All this while you are wide-awake and alert!,” she wrote in a letter of complaint to the hospital.

“To have to do this without sedation is quite frankly inhuman.”

Cooper is the second senior to come forward to complain about having cataract surgery without sedation at the hospital on June 25 because of recent OHIP fee cuts. Sharon Phillips, also 65, told the Star recently that her ophthalmologist was quite upset about having to do the operation without sedation and had complained that doctors would stop doing it because it was dangerous.

The two women say they were among 14 cataract patients denied sedation that day. They say they were given no advanced warning, but that they did get a topical numbing gel.

No word yet from Ezra Klein on this one.