A Courtenay woman says she was sent home in “excruciating pain” from the emergency department of North Island Hospital last August, even though she had an ectopic pregnancy that could have killed her.
Last fall, Jillian Darbyshire filed a formal complaint with Island Health. After initial communication, she had yet to hear follow-up from the ER leadership when she reached out to the Times Colonist last week.
“One minute I was pregnant and the next week I had lost my baby and almost my life,” said Darbyshire, 27. “I want to advocate for women and ensure something like this never happens to anyone else.”
Ectopic pregnancies occur in up to two per cent of all pregnancies — higher in IVF pregnancies — when a fertilized egg plants itself outside, rather than inside, the uterus.
When that happens, it’s almost always in a fallopian tube. Such pregnancies are a prevalent cause of maternal death during the first trimester.
Darbyshire, the mother of a two-year-old, had two positive take-home pregnancy tests late last August, one indicating she was two to three weeks along. On Aug. 30, after experiencing bleeding and abdominal pain, she visited the ER at the Courtenay hospital.
She said she arrived about 8:40 p.m. and was seen at about 3 the next morning. She underwent blood work and was instructed to return at 1:30 p.m. that same day, about nine hours later, for an ultrasound.
“I almost burst out into tears because I simply could not wait that long,” she said.
With a persistent sharp pain in her side and continued bleeding, she returned to the hospital at 10:30 a.m.
The first ultrasound scan suggested a ruptured cyst, a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy.
If left untreated, a tubal ectopic pregnancy can cause fallopian tube damage and heavy bleeding that could be deadly, according to the provincial health website HealthLinkBC.
In Darbyshire’s case, more blood work was scheduled for Sept. 3 at LifeLabs, with another ultrasound booked at the hospital for Sept. 5.
“I was in sweating pain, trying to care for my daughter and my dog,” she said. By the time Darbyshire was scheduled to go to LifeLabs, she realized she was too ill. She couldn’t urinate due to the pressure on her abdomen.
She returned to the ER reporting “unbearable” pain, which she ranked at “15” on a scale of one to 10.
“And they looked at me like I was crazy, [as if I was] just saying that to be dramatic,” said Darbyshire.
She sat in the ER for hours until she again summoned the courage to approach another nurse who seemed to take her symptoms more seriously.
“I stood there trying to describe what was going on while feeling so lightheaded and in excruciating pain,” she said.
At one point, she felt as if her body were going into shock with “shooting pains everywhere.” Her breathing was laboured and also caused discomfort.
“That was the scariest feeling in the world and the most pain I have ever been in.”
As an ectopic pregnancy progresses or ruptures, symptoms can include sudden or severe pain in the belly or pelvis, shoulder pain caused by bleeding into the belly under the diaphragm, dizziness or fainting.
Darbyshire eventually received morphine, but became intensely nauseous and even more lightheaded. After an exam by a gynecologist, she was told her pregnancy was no longer viable.
She was given the option of laparoscopic surgery — which can remove the ectopic tissue and repair any fallopian tube damage — or medical treatment with Methotrexate, commonly used in chemotherapy to stop cell division and growth, which ends the pregnancy and allows for the body to reabsorb it, leaving the fallopian tube intact.
Darbyshire feared that if she chose the medication route, “they would have sent me home to die.”
“I immediately said surgery because I knew something was really wrong,” said Darbyshire.
From the hospital. Darbyshire filed a complaint with Island Health’s Patient Care Quality Office. She chose the option of talking to the emergency department staff to understand what went wrong and what could be improved.
But after some initial communication on her complaint, she didn’t hear anything more. Calls to the complaints office to inquire about the status of the investigation went unanswered. “I wanted the investigation to find out exactly what happened,” said Darbyshire.
Island Health said its Patient Care Quality Office was in contact with Darbyshire and that process was completed in late 2024.
“Subsequently, site leadership committed to providing additional information to this patient about her care experience … unfortunately, that did not occur as expected,” Island Health said in a statement.
After becoming aware of the “breakdown in communication” through questions from the Times Colonist, an emergency department manager from North Island Hospital contacted Darbyshire on June 18 to apologize.
Island Health said it strives to offer excellence in care and is “sorry that we did not meet these expectations,” adding that it also understands that long ER waits add to frustration and stress for patients in already challenging situations.
B.C. Conservative Courtenay-Comox MLA Brennan Day said in a Facebook post that his office was recently contacted by “multiple frontline healthcare professionals” at North Island Hospital in Courtenay who were concerned about “being asked to do more with less” despite the ER being busier than ever.
“Every shift, I see coworkers crying, considering quitting but still working as hard as they can. Every shift I see patients in pain, covered in urine, hungry and in the hallway,” Day quoted one worker as saying.
The individual told Day’s office that patient volume had increased by 36 per cent since 2020.
Island Health said the average number of patients per day visiting that ER has grown about five per cent since the fiscal year 2022/23, to 110 a day.
Staff at the Courtenay hospital “go beyond every day” to deliver high-quality, safe and compassionate care under challenging circumstances, said the health authority, noting it values feedback from both staff and elected officials.
Darbyshire said she couldn’t have had better post-op care in the maternity ward — “Everyone was so patient and kind” — and the gynecologist personally visited her afterwards.
But she said she’s still haunted by what might have happened if she didn’t “harass” ER staff.
“If I wasn’t as persistent as I was, I don’t think I’d be here today.”
