Robot helps replace woman's hip
Surgeons at Burnaby Hospital are celebrating what they say is a first for Western Canada, after replacing a patient's hip with the help of a robotic arm.
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CBC
3 hours ago
- CBC
For long COVID sufferers, a beacon of hope closes its doors
People who continue to suffer the effects of COVID-19 long after contracting the illness say they're concerned to be losing a major resource in eastern Ontario. The Ottawa Hospital's outpatient post-COVID rehabilitation program opened in July 2021. According to the hospital, it helped treat more than 160 patients before shutting its doors in May. Dennis Murphy, who spent nearly two years on the hospital's waitlist, called the closure frustrating. He contracted COVID-19 in June 2023, and has been experiencing lingering symptoms including brain fog and fatigue ever since. The Kingston, Ont., resident was first referred to The Ottawa Hospital program in August 2023, but was still waiting for treatment when the hospital announced the program was ending. "This [disease] has had a very serious impact on my life," said Murphy, who recognized others have suffered through worse. "I've been able to continue working, I'm continually able to enjoy many things, if at a lesser level. That is not the case with a lot of people." For Murphy, it's been the little things that most people take for granted, like taking his kids to the beach. "I'm really hoping that I can do that this summer, but I realize that if I choose to, I will probably will not be able to do much the next day," he said. When CBC visited Murphy's home, he grew tired after gardening for a short time. "It's difficult psychologically ... when you really want to do something and be out and active. It limits my ability to do things that I like to do," he said. Susan Whitton was more fortunate. She contracted COVID in January 2023 and was accepted into the rehabilitation program the following January. She said it was invaluable, and she fears for others who won't get the same chance. "It kind of feels like they've been abandoned. They've been sort of left on their own," she said. "If I caught COVID now and there was no support, there was nowhere to turn, you were trying to solve this on your own — I don't know what people are doing now." She said she's still recovering, more than two years after first contracting the illness. "I may look better on the outside, and for my job I pretend that everything is fine and everything is wonderful. But it's not. It's a struggle every day," she said. In a statement, The Ottawa Hospital said the clinic supported more than 160 patients with long COVID-19 symptoms since its launch. "In alignment with other centres across Ontario, The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre (TOHRC) made the difficult decision to close the program," the hospital wrote in a statement to CBC. "Care teams at TOHRC are working to provide alternative resources, including educational materials and peer support options, to help patients continue managing their recovery." But Murphy questions that decision. He called the program's record "woefully inadequate," given the number of long COVID sufferers who are still seeking treatment. Ontario's Ministry of Health said in a statement that it released guidelines to diagnose, assess and manage patients with long COVID, and provided a resource page on the illness. It did not point to any similar rehabilitation programs available to patients in eastern Ontario. In December 2023, Statistics Canada reported that about 3.5 million Canadian adults reported experiencing long-term symptoms from COVID-19, and nearly 80 per cent experienced symptoms lasting six months or more. Only three provinces have extended funding for long COVID treatment, according to Dr. Angela Cheung, a professor of medicine and a senior physician scientist at the University Health Network, University of Toronto. (Cheung has no connection to The Ottawa Hospital's post-COVID rehabilitation program). She said there's still much that's unknown about long COVID. "It's kind of like HIV in the early days. We are making progress, but science does take time," she said. "We do sort of need to give it a little bit more time, so we see results from trials." For patients in eastern Ontario, that doesn't provide much comfort.
CBC
3 hours ago
- CBC
When the day came that my son no longer needed a heart monitor, everyone was happy but me
This First Person column is the experience of Natasha Chiam, who lives in Edmonton. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. In the picture I don't even remember taking, my husband is standing at the entrance to a pediatric ICU patient room, his head resting on his arm as he leans against the frame of the doorway as if it were the only thing holding him up. Inside the room were at least 10 people, all doing their part to save our seven-year-old son who had just gone into cardiac arrest. One of these people, the soft-spoken yet confident senior resident doctor, is up on the hospital bed doing chest compressions on our boy, his large gloved hands covering the whole span of my child's chest. I remember standing about five feet behind my husband. I can't recall whether I was breathing or crying. I'm not sure if it was one nurse or two holding me up, but I clearly remember not wanting to sit down. As I watched the medical team work on my son, I was dissociating. I was visualizing the trajectory of my child's life splitting in two and focusing on the most terrible of those futures. I saw myself planning my child's funeral, telling his five-year-old sister that she had lost a brother, and me, failing horribly at a life without him in it. Fortunately, providence — and the steady hands and minds of every single health-care professional in that room — were focused on the future with my child surviving. The pediatric ICU team successfully resuscitated him and put him on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), an advanced therapy that does the work of the heart and lungs when a patient's own organs are too sick or weak to function on their own. Our son remained on ECMO for six more days. His body, the multiple machines it was connected to and the medications being pumped into it worked in concert to fight the streptococcus infection that led to septic shock and multi-organ failure. Learning to let go of the trauma Today, more than 10 years after it all happened, I feel caught between remembering and moving on. When you look at my healthy, broad-shouldered son — now taller than his father and more man than boy — the only visible reminder of what he endured is a three-inch, jagged and faded scar at the base of his neck. It's the mark left by the rushed incision made by the pediatric cardiovascular surgeon when they connected him to the heart-lung machine. About six months ago, I got a call from the pediatric brain injury clinic at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. Because he also had a small stroke while on ECMO, a side effect that happens to about 10 per cent of patients, my son has been monitored by the program for the past decade. He was assessed at each major cognitive or emotional transition in his life: post-illness reintegration to elementary school, elementary school to junior high, junior high to high school. He was two months shy of his 18th birthday and the clinic was calling to discharge him. He was aging out of the program. I know this is a good thing — he hasn't needed further services from the clinic for years, was recently given a clean bill of health from his pediatrician and has been accepted into the program of his choice at the University of Alberta. He is ready for this next transition. So then why, after I hung up that call, did a heavy sense of dread settle deep in my belly? As if the giant net beneath our carefully choreographed trapeze act of health and survival had been yanked away without warning? I realize now that the trauma we lived through left a lasting imprint on my mind, body and soul. And as much as I want to move forward, I'm struggling to let go of the medical services that have surrounded us for so long, offering a sense of control, comfort and reassurance in a world that once felt so fragile. When my son was in the intensive care unit, he was continuously monitored by a machine that measured and displayed his every breath and heartbeat. My own heart would beat in time with the reassuring flashing numbers on the screen. When the day came that he no longer needed the monitor, everyone was happy but me. How was I supposed to just sit there without the constant reassurance of those blinking numbers, knowing that only a week ago, his tiny heart had stopped? Those nights at the hospital, without the monitor to count either of our heartbeats, I would lie awake on the blue vinyl cot wedged between my son's bed and the wall, squinting in the dark to watch his chest rise and fall, holding his hand to feel his pulse. I know there is truth to the statement "the body keeps the score" because I feel it deep within my whole self. Remembering In the years afterward, nothing would set my heart racing like hearing another parent casually mention a round of strep throat sweeping through a classroom. In our house, even the slightest fever — anything above 37.5 — is treated swiftly and seriously. And I will be the first to admit to a level of hypervigilance about both my kids' mental health that may be borderline obsessive. While it may not be the healthiest way to live, there is a kind of comfort in knowing the score and what my trauma triggers are. Also keeping score is the part of my mind that pipes up every now and then and tells me to stop being so dramatic. Because my son survived. He no longer needs intense medical care. He is healthy and strong. He is an honours student. He surprises me daily — sometimes with his interest and opinions about world politics, sometimes with a random hug out of the strange blue yonder of adolescence. By every possible metric I could imagine, he is thriving. My brain knows I should feel gratitude for how far he has come and how lucky we are to have had the care and services from an incredible health-care team. The rational part of me knows it's time to adjust to what is. My body, on the other hand, still remembers and reacts to what was. All this "discharging" from the pediatric services feels like being thrown into a free fall — no plan, no contingencies, no safety net — and the last time I felt like this was the day the nurses turned off his monitor all those years ago. Here I am again, having to trust in his recovery. That my healthy and thriving child's transition to adulthood is more of a launch and less like plunging into an abyss. I know I'll get to the trusting part eventually. Until then, as long as my not-so-tiny boy lives under my roof, there will always be a part of me that needs to periodically peek into his room at night, squint into the darkness to make out his silhouette and listen for the sound of his breathing.
CTV News
10 hours ago
- CTV News
‘Bring the digital into your world': U of R students share augmented reality projects
University students are sharing their augmented reality (AR) projects with families at the Saskatchewan Science Centre. Created by U of R students, the AR design allows people to view digital illustrations in their current environment by scanning a QR code. 'Augmented reality is like Pokémon Go. That's one of the more common examples that people tend to understand,' explained Evie Johnny Ruddy, assistant professor of Creative Technologies and Design at the U of R. 'Whereas with VR, you put a headset on and you're completely in the digital world, AR allows you to bring the digital into your world. It looks like the digital would be in this space with us.' Five different projects were showcased, including The Eternal Walking Path, Nature Hunt, Poetry Pathway, Escape the Cabin, and the Absence of Space. Shelby Kerbs, creative technologist of Nature Hunt, said her project focuses on connecting nature to urban areas. 'It's a scavenger hunt where you're going to find basically little snow piles around. Each time you click on one, in your AR experience, you're going to get a Saskatchewan perennial plant that pops up and you're going to learn about it,' she said. Augmented reality University of Regina (U of R) students are sharing their augmented reality (AR) projects with families at the Saskatchewan Science Centre. (Sierra D'Souza Butts/CTV News) Based on her passion for plants, Kerbs said the project was an opportunity to share her interest with others. 'I did a focus on plants specifically for my own personal interest. I've been a garden centre worker for a long time and I have always been interested in plants,' she expressed. '….I was trying to make a scavenger hunt in the sense that you're trying to find plants in urban spaces specifically like Victoria Park, downtown Regina. You're going to try and find plants [in the city] instead of just seeing always grass and trees.' Students being able to share their projects with the public was part of the 'experiential learning component' to the Creative Technologies and Design class. Despite being similar to VR, Ruddy shared the key differences, stating augmented experiences help provide a visual realistic point of view. 'I love AR because you can change your environment with digital artworks and content. You can bring it into your own space, and it looks like it's in the space with you,' Ruddy said. 'It can change the way you see the world around you. It can be really immersive, just as immersive as VR. I hope people try out the projects. I hope that they find them enjoyable and exciting and that they gain a better understanding of what AR is.'
