Pandemic backlogs put life at risk, says Winnipeg man waiting for kidney, heart transplants
CBC
Stacks of cardboard boxes line the wall of a spare room in Matthew Laferriere's bungalow in Winnipeg's Windsor Park neighbourhood.
Each night, the 33-year-old takes a plastic bag of fluid from one of the boxes and loads it into his home dialysis machine.
After nearly six years of using the life-saving device, Laferriere's wait for a kidney transplant was set to end in 2020. He'd found a living donor, been cleared for the procedure and only needed the hospital to schedule the operation.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
"[I've gone] from being three or four months away from a kidney transplant to a year and a half later still in the same place I was before," Laferriere said. "Except feeling a lot worse."
When the pandemic delayed his operation, his condition worsened. Last January, his medical team told him his heart was no longer strong enough to tolerate the kidney transplant.
He'd need a heart transplant first.
"That was my window," Laferriere said. "Nine months worth of delays and my heart failed."
It's taken Laferriere a year to do the tests, diagnostics and appointments for his heart transplant.
Because Manitoba does not perform heart transplants, he's also waiting to hear from Toronto's Peter Munk Cardiac Centre about whether he'll be added to the list of candidates for a new heart.
Transplant programs across Canada were paused, including Manitoba's, at the start of the pandemic. While Manitoba's resumed in May 2020, it was paused again during the pandemic's third wave in November of last year.
It started up again in February, but staff shortages, surgery backlogs and longer waits for diagnostics have left the transplant program playing catch-up.
Living organ donation last year was at its lowest level in a decade across the country, according to the latest numbers from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
They show the rate in 2020 was down 21 per cent from 2019.
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