'He never came home': Woman decries husband's treatment at Fort Smith health centre
CBC
A Fort Smith woman wants answers after receiving medical records from her husband's death at the health centre last year that don't line up with her experience of what happened.
Bernadette Samok's husband, 65-year-old Ernie Tourangeau, had been having difficulty breathing. He lost consciousness in the health centre waiting room before seeing a doctor, and despite efforts to revive him, he never woke up.
"Why didn't they get someone to look at him right away?" said Samok.
Samok asked the health centre for her husband's medical records. According to Tourangeau's outpatient services report, he arrived at the health centre on Oct. 16, 2020, at 12:05 p.m.
The visit record says he went blue and became unresponsive "within seconds" of entering the waiting room and was "immediately brought into the trauma bay by nursing staff." After "over 25 minutes of CPR" and discussion with the family, the decision was made to stop.
Medical records, obtained by CBC News, note Tourangeau's time of death as 12:39 p.m.
But Samok says the records' version of events are inaccurate.
She said they actually arrived at the health centre 31 minutes earlier, at 11:34 a.m., and despite asking to be seen right away, they were told to wait in the waiting room.
Samok wants to know why her husband wasn't seen immediately, and why his medical record was altered to suggest they arrived later.
Samok said on the morning of Oct. 16, 2020, Tourangeau was having trouble breathing, so they decided to go to the emergency room.
Tourangeau was having such difficulty, said Samok, that she had to help him get dressed.
Samok said they arrived at the health centre at 11:34 a.m. She knows because she checked her phone when it beeped with a notification from a board game app.
She said the receptionist told her to go to the waiting room because there was only one doctor working, which she did.
"I was going to put the TV on, and he said, 'I love you, hun,' and I said, 'I love you, babe,' then I heard [a gasp]. I heard him breathing like that and I looked and then he wasn't breathing," said Samok.
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