A B.C. woman initially did not go on the transplant list because of the prohibitive cost of staying in Vancouver for months post-surgery. She is now recovering from a double-lung transplant and vowing to continue the fight for others from rural areas who need life-saving surgery. Aaron McArthur reports.
By Aaron McArthur & Simon Little Global News
Posted August 22, 2024
A B.C. woman who had to fight for her double-lung transplant is now recovering from her surgery but says she’ll keep fighting for patient access.
When Global News first met Christina Derksen-Unrau, she was unable to walk more than a few steps and was constantly short of breath due to asthma, emphysema and lung cancer.
But in March she took herself off the transplant list in March because she didn’t have the $35,000 to $55,000 she would have needed to stay in Vancouver for the mandatory post-operative recovery period.
Her story resonated with the public, leading to an outpouring of offers for places to stay and other supports, and Dersken-Unrau finally got her surgery on June 24.
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“It’s like night and day. I can breathe, I can walk, I can do all the things I couldn’t do before. And I’m only right at the beginning,” she told Global News on Thursday.
“A second chance at life, and it’s all because of my (lung) donor and my donor’s family.”
While Derksen-Unrau is now on the mend, she said her case was far from unique and that people across British Columbia still face massive financial barriers accessing care if they have to travel.
The provincial government has increased funding for travel and accommodation for people who must travel to major centres for care, but the focus of that money has primarily been on cancer patients.
Derksen-Unrau said transplant patients, particularly those in need of new lungs, remain overlooked.
“We’re still pushing this forward and we’re not going to stop until there is a change in place so that nobody dies,” she said.
“Nobody deserves to die because of money, because the Health Act says no person shall be denied access to health care by any barrier, including financial.”
Speaking at a housing announcement Thursday, Premier David Eby acknowledged that gaps remain in health-care coverage for B.C.’s rural communities.
“Small communities in the province … have really faced the brunt of the health-care worker shortage that we are seeing in Canada, not just here in B.C.,” he said.
The province’s focus, he said, remains on attracting workers to those areas, highlighting 7,000 new nurses and 700 new family doctors recently added to the system.
“We are still facing emergency room closures in small communities, so we can’t let up.”
Derksen-Unrau said she has met with Eby and was clear she wants to see more for transplant patients.
She wants to see B.C. adopt a model used in other provinces where donors have offered up homes or buildings for surgery patients to live in, which are then operated by the province.
“I wasn’t doing it for just me. I am doing it for everyone else so no one else has to sit where I sat and make the decision to take yourself off the list because you don’t have money,” she said.
“There should be funding in place by the government to take care of people for their housing needs.”
