N.S. woman calls health-care system ‘dangerous’ after having surgery postponed

Andrea Ritcey severed an artery and a nerve in her hand in an accident. She needed surgery and was told 72 hours would be ideal, but ended up waiting 12 days for the procedure.

Strumming a few chords on her guitar is all music teacher Andrea Ritcey can manage right now, after seriously injuring her hand during the Thanksgiving Day long weekend.

The Nova Scotia woman, who is also recovering from stage 3 endometrial cancer, had to wait nearly two weeks for a much-needed surgery.

Now, she’s speaking out because she has seen first-hand how much of a “crisis” the province’s health-care system truly is.

“Having to wait 12 days to get assistance was really triggering,” she told Global News.

“The pain can’t be compared to anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I was saying to my family, ‘I’m pretty tough. I’ve done chemo and radiation and I’ve birthed two babies.'”

Ritcey says she was preparing to host more than a dozen people for Thanksgiving dinner when she picked up a mason jar, and it shattered in her hand.

“It was bad. I severed an artery and a nerve and a muscle and I cut basically from the webbing of my hand,” she said.

She says she rushed to hospital after the accident and a doctor was able to clamp the artery and stich up the wound. She was told she required surgery and that 72 hours would be the ideal window to repair the nerve.