Mum’s $30,000 loan to end pain
In Her Head is a Herald campaign for better women’s health services. Health reporter Emma Russell investigates what’s wrong with our system and talks to wa¯hine who have been made to feel their serious illness is a figment of their imagination or “just part of being a woman”. Today she talks to Sanjana Chand
Amum took out a $30,000 loan to get her uterus removed after spending more than a year on the Taranaki District Health Board’s waiting list in crippling pain.
“That money should be going towards my son’s education,” Sanjana Chand told the Herald the day before she had the surgery.
The 41-year-old, who was born in Fiji and moved to New Zealand in 2007, has suffered endometriosis, adenomyosis and fibroids since she was a teenager, though she wasn’t officially diagnosed until decades later.
“I have fainted at my workplace too many times, have been to the emergency department on multiple occasions with the pain and was only told that I have to manage my pain somehow.” When she finally got an appointment with a specialist at the DHB, Chand said, she was told her only option to get rid of the pain was a hysterectomy.
Initially, she received a letter from the DHB in June 2020 saying she would have her surgery in four months, but she was never given a date. Four months passed and she still hadn’t heard anything. She tried contacting the DHB but was repeatedly told there was a delay and someone would be in touch soon. Six months passed, then a year.
In June last year, Chand received another letter informing her she was booked in to see another gynaecologist in September before she could get a new surgery date.
When she asked why she had been given another appointment “the response was, the gynaecologist that saw me initially is on leave due to his own health issues, so now I am given to someone else. Looks like I am bumped off the list. It’s not my fault, so why should I suffer? I mean, seriously? . . . I actually don’t blame the doctors and nurses, they are amazing and only trying to help — but they are helpless because no matter how hard they try, if the system sucks, nothing can be done.”
Her husband and employer have been a massive support, but the impact of waiting in excruciating pain was soul-destroying, she said. Chand had been studying to become an accountant but after passing her first paper with a B+, she had to withdraw from the course because of ongoing pain. “I can’t even walk properly because of my back and pelvic pain,” she told the Herald at the time.
She said she was lucky to work with an amazing boss, who gave her time off to rest at home because she was regularly fainting at work.
Taranaki DHB’s chief operating officer Gillian Campbell said the DHB received a complaint from Chand and investigated the delay in her care. Campbell apologised on behalf of the DHB to Chand, saying she understood waiting for surgery was stressful.
Hospital staff were under extraordinary pressure and high patient demand challenged them on a weekly basis, Campbell said. The pressure resulted from a Covid backlog, an increased number of referrals from GPs and other community providers and a rise in emergency surgeries.
“We are aware and concerned about the length of time for patients to receive surgery for gynaecology problems. However, we need to prioritise surgery in order of urgency, with conditions such as cancers taking precedence.”
The average wait for routine hysterectomy surgery at Taranaki DHB was 283 days (9.4 months), Campbell said. This was significantly longer than the national target of four months from a specialist appointment.
Chand got fed up with waiting. She took out a $30,000 loan and paid a private gynaecologist in Auckland to remove her uterus.
She had the operation in August. When the Herald checked back in with her three months later, she said: “My recovery has been amazing, life is so much better now after the surgery. I even play golf.”
Her message to government officials was: “Please don’t let another woman or young teenage girls suffer like me. Please help because we aren’t just numbers, we are people.”
Tomorrow: Monique’s story