BC man dies after life-saving surgery was cancelled due to coronavirus

Chris Walcroft, a 50-year-old father, passed away last month after a scheduled surgery to prepare his kidney dialysis was cancelled. His wife, Delia Oliveira, said the surgery would have been the first surgical step toward life-saving treatment. She said that it was cancelled by the hospital without explanation.

While elective surgeries have been cancelled or postponed, this was an essential procedure in order to save Walcroft's life.

“I had another girlfriend who was actually starting chemo the day after and her chemo was postponed… his [surgery] was straight up cancelled,” Oliveira said.

“He never got a chance to see his specialist or get another chance to be able to get his surgery.”

In August 2019, Walcroft was told by medical professionals that his kidneys were functioning at 17 percent, and without dialysis, it was very likely he would die within a year.

The procedure would have inserted a arteriovenous fistula, required for dialysis. This surgery was scheduled for mid-March but was cancelled the day before the procedure. Oliveira said a follow-up appointment with Walcroft’s specialist was scheduled for April 15—the day he died.

“I’m absolutely sure I’m not the only one that this has happened to and I’m not the only one that this is going to happen to. It’s not fair,” she said.

“People are sick with other stuff as well. This is ridiculous. All we hear about is Covid-19, [but] other things are happening.”

As of mid-April, nearly 14,000 scheduled surgeries in British Columbia had been cancelled since officials began removing elective surgeries from the schedule in mid-March. According to BC Health Minister Adrian Dix, however, more than 8,000 surgeries have been completed within that time frame.

Dix said a little over half of those were scheduled urgent surgeries and the remainder were unscheduled emergency surgeries.

Just last week, Ontario’s Health Minister Christine Elliott reported that nearly 40 people in the province had died because they were unable to have heart surgery due to the pandemic. This raises questions about how serious Covid-19 is compared to life-saving heart procedures.

BC has experienced 117 deaths of those infected with coronavirus. Of the 2,224 that have been diagnosed with the virus, 1,417 have recovered, at time of writing.

Oliveira said she hopes health officials turn their attention to non-infected patients amid the ongoing pandemic, remembering her husband as a kind, community-oriented man who loved being a father.

“He helped others on his time—our family time,” she said. “If you go to his Facebook page and you see all the people that he helped… he was an unbelievably good dad.”