QCH has expanded, adapted to meet growing needs.

September 16, 2024

Written by Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen. 

 

For more than a month last winter Sally Hodgson battled a respiratory illness she couldn’t shake. In January that illness became a life-threatening crisis.

After feeling under the weather for weeks despite treatment with inhalers and antibiotics, Hodgson woke up one morning unable to catch her breath or even speak. Her husband was already at work. She called her sister, who could barely make out what she was trying to say, and then she dialed 911.

Hodgson remembers the beginning of the ambulance ride to Queensway Carleton Hospital but the subsequent hours, days and weeks are a blur.

The 59-year-old Ottawa woman learned later that she had been suffering from RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). The protracted illness led to acute respiratory distress syndrome, a type of respiratory failure marked by widespread inflammation in the lungs. She became so sick that doctors at Queensway Carleton sent her to the University of Ottawa Heart Institute where she was kept alive on an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine — a heart and lung machine similar to the ones used in open heart surgery. The Heart Institute operates the regional ECMO program.

Hodgson has no memory of that critical period until she was back in intensive care at Queensway Carleton for recovery. When she returned home last spring, she could only walk short distances — with the help of a walker. She was too weak to hold a mug.

She is beginning to feel more like herself again, slowly, with rehabilitation and rest.

Her case was both critical and complex, the kind health professionals at Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH) have been seeing more of lately.

Once a small, community hospital on the western side of Ottawa, the QCH has undergone big changes in recent years. Those changes have mirrored the growth and complexity of the population and reflect the times. Many of the hospital’s patients, like Hodgson, are much sicker than patients were in the past and they increasingly have more complex needs, sometimes related to delayed care during the pandemic and family doctor shortages.

 

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