Airlifting sick kids: ‘How can I leave my child?’
Mother recounts horror of having girl flown to hospital without her
Abbygail Wellman of St-Augustin, an isolated village on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, says she will never forget the day her daughter, Khloe, 5, suffered a medical emergency and was airlifted to a children’s hospital in Quebec City. Wellman, who couldn’t get on the same flight because of Quebec’s noescort policy on the Challenger jet, said she lived through a nightmare no parent should ever experience.
Wellman is sharing her story in the hope of changing a policy that cruelly separates critically ill children from their parents during medical evacuations.
The ordeal began at 7 a.m. on Sept. 22, when Wellman went to wake her daughter for school and found her convulsing with seizures. A local clinic, staffed with two nurses, was not equipped to handle the case, and mother and child were airlifted together to a hospital in Blanc-Sablon, a 20-minute flight. Wellman’s husband, Robert Leon, stayed at home awaiting news.
At the hospital, Khloe continued thrashing and shaking with one seizure after another.
She began having trouble breathing. By now it was 10:30 a.m., and her condition had deteriorated: blood pressure, heart rate, fever and carbon dioxide levels were extremely high. Wellman says she watched the scene with fear and horror, as a medical team of eight or nine doctors and nurses attempted to medically stabilize her child.
“That is when it hit me for the first time: Oh my God, I may lose my child,” Wellman said.
Khloe’s doctor took Wellman out to the hallway and told her, “Things don’t look good.” Khloe would have to be flown to the pediatric hospital in Quebec City, more than 2,100 kilometres away, as soon as the Challenger arrived in Blanc- Sablon.
Wellman called her husband, choking out the details amid tears, and then, feeling helpless, went back to the emergency room to hold her daughter’s hand.
A while later, a nurse pulled Wellman aside to tell her she could not get on the Challenger with her daughter. Her options were limited: take the next commercial flight to Quebec at 2:20 p.m. that afternoon or wait until Sunday — because there were no commercial flights on Saturday.
“At this point I broke down in tears sobbing, begging to be allowed to go with my child because she was not stable. What if she woke up and asked for her Mommy and I was not there with her? How many hours would my sweet little girl be alone waiting at the Blanc Sablon hospital with no parent by her side if I left her?
“How can I leave my child like this?”
Wellman is one of many voices to argue that separating parents from gravely ill and dying children during medical transport is unacceptably cruel.
The Canadian Paediatric Society, Indigenous leaders and health workers have long demanded changes to Quebec’s policy of sending sick children for medical care thousands of kilometres from home unaccompanied by a family member. They say the current medevac practice is offensive and barbaric, traumatizing for both parent and child. One distraught mother ran on the tarmac after the jet. Another, a nurse working in Northern Quebec, says she still hasn’t recovered from the trauma; her three-year-old son died alone aboard the Challenger during transport.
Parents are best at comforting an anxious child, studies show, and their absence causes barriers to health care, while denying them the right to be informed of the nature and risks of critical treatment. On Tuesday a petition calling for abolishing the policy, which fails to reflect a standard of care available in the rest of Canada, was launched on the Quebec National Assembly website.
“I was literally, at this point, in a state of shock and very emotional,” Wellman said.
The nurse apologetically explained the no-escort policy on the Challenger was protocol, however Wellman needed to get on the regular flight that afternoon so she could be by Khloe’s side when she arrived at the hospital.
The hospital arranged for Wellman’s husband to fly from StAugustin to Blanc-Sablon. His flight would land 45 minutes after Wellman left for Quebec City. The nurse promised to hold Khloe’s hand, and not let got until her father arrived. “This gave me some comfort,” Wellman recalled.
But for Wellman, the forced abandonment of her daughter at her sickest was a painful moment she says she will never forget.
“It still breaks my heart when I think about that moment of fear and uncertainty, questioning myself if I was making the right choice.”
“No parent should have to know the feeling of having to leave their child alone in that state, to have a few moments to whisper in their ear everything you want to say to them … not knowing if it will be your last words or your last moment together,” she said. “I smelled her beautiful brown curly hair and kissed her before I found the courage to let her hand go and walk away to catch my plane.”
Wellman cried on the flight to Sept-Îles. From there, she cried on the flight to Quebec City. She got to the children’s hospital at 7 p.m., two-and-half hours before Khloe.
It has been nearly five months now since Khloe started struggling with a rare form of epilepsy — Hemi-convulsion-Hemiplegia-Epilepsy (HHE) syndrome. She developed brain swelling, paralysis on her right side, and spent eight days in the intensive-care unit. The epilepsy caused some brain atrophy. But a great team of therapists and doctors in Quebec City helped her walk and talk again, and regain mobility in her right arm and hand, Wellman said. The family expects to be back home by the end of the week.
“I think back to that time and I am eternally thankful to the medical team at Blanc-Sablon who saved her life that day and managed to stabilize our daughter in preparation for the flight to Quebec, and that things did not go in the opposite direction.”
But no parent and child should be separated during a medical crisis, Wellman said. “I would like to ask (Quebec Health) Minister Gaétan Barrette and those responsible for this policy if they would be OK with their children or grandchildren flying alone like my brave little five-year-old had to do that day?”
On Tuesday, in response to mounting pressure from pediatric specialists, physicians at Montreal Children’s and Sainte-Justine hospitals, the Nunavik regional health board, Indigenous leaders and activists, Barrette said he asked managers of the EVAQ system to examine alternatives and report back to him.
No parent should have to know the feeling of having to leave their child alone in that state.