Woman waits 20 hours in ER, learns she needed emergency surgery

Lori Stetina says she spent nearly all day and night waiting to be admitted to hospital. Then, she was told she needed surgery.

July 3, 2025, was a day Lori Stetina will never forget.

She woke up not feeling well and decided she needed to go to the emergency room. An ambulance picked her up and took her to Winnipeg’s Grace Hospital.

“When I arrived by ambulance, I wasn’t on a bed. I was brought in sitting up inside the back of an ambulance,” said Stetina, who spoke with CTV News outside of the hospital. “When I walked in, there were people all lined up, and elderly people lined up against the wall.”

She says she waited for over 20 hours in the emergency room and didn’t get admitted until 5 a.m. on July 4.

“I was fearing for my life,” she said.

Once she was admitted, she was informed that she had been suffering from a mild heart attack.

“I was kind of shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I never had anything like that happen before. I was surprised.”

Stetina was given blood tests, a couple of EKGs and was sent for a CT scan, where she found out more bad news.

“I had two doctors standing over me in O.R. gear and they told me I had to have emergency surgery right now,” she said. “I didn’t even know what I was having surgery for.”

What Stetina didn’t know was her bowel was perforated and leaked into her stomach.

“I woke up to having 19 staples on my stomach,” she said.

Stetina says it was an experience she wishes she never went through and couldn’t believe how long she had to wait.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have a clue about anything. No doctors came to me before these tests were done.”

“I was terrified,” she said. “I phoned my husband, and they said the call had to end because they had to take me for emergency surgery,” she said.

‘Committed to improving access’

In a statement to CTV News, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA), says it recognizes the challenges patients and staff face in emergency rooms across the city.

“The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority continues to work with system partners to improve patient flow and reduce wait times,” a statement from a WRHA spokesperson reads.

“This includes increasing staffing where possible, improving coordination between care teams, and supporting timely admissions and discharges so patients receive care in the most appropriate setting. Hospitals have also begun implementing measures to discharge patients on weekends to help people return home sooner and reduce bed block.”

The long wait times continued this week. On Wednesday afternoon, the WRHA’s website, which shows current wait times at emergency departments across the city, put wait times at St. Boniface Hospital at around 10 hours, and waits at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) at over 12 hours.

State of health care is ‘challenging’

Dr. Noam Katz is a Winnipeg Emergency Physician, working for eight years at the city’s St. Boniface Hospital.

“There are a lot of very difficult things that are again becoming very challenging to overcome, and wait times are the outcome that we all see because of it,” he said.

Katz says wait times in hospitals, including the one he works at, have ‘ballooned significantly.’

He says there are many days where wait times are extremely long, and they are not able to provide the proper care patients deserve.

And when asked how frustrating that is, Katz simply said “very.”

“Long wait times definitely lead to poor patient outcomes in many cases, and we are seeing this locally, nationally and internationally,” he said. “There are many stories about this, which is really unfortunate, and I can assure you nobody in health care wants to see that happen.”

“We desperately want to get people into appropriate treatment spaces so that we can do the investigations to find the people that really do need that life-sustaining care.”

But Katz says there isn’t one magic answer to fix the state of health care in the province.

“If there was, we would’ve done it many times over at this point,” he said. “We just want to see at least incremental gains and improvements, which I think we are struggling to see in real time right now.”

“Ultimately, the most important thing is that we’re able to provide appropriate care to patients in their time of need, which is what an emergency department is supposed to do,” he said.

Preventative action needed

Health advocates say disturbing emergency room stories are happening all too often at hospitals across Canada.

“These terrible stories continue to persist,” said Steven Staples, National Director of Policy and Advocacy with the Canadian Health Coalition.

“We can only hope that when these things come to light, they are kind of treated like a plane crash, where someone goes in, finds out what the situation is, determines the cause and then takes steps to ensure these things don’t happen again,” he said.

Staples said he hopes in the long run, the health care system in Canada can move towards a more preventative model, where people get earlier care and avoid the emergency room altogether.

“We know that people have trouble accessing family doctors who know the person’s case history, who can monitor and make sure their situation is being improved, and ultimately keep them out of a situation where they have to go to emergency,” he said.