FREDERICTON — Grant Jordan was driving to a friend's house on Aug. 31 when he started feeling tightness in his chest. He immediately returned home and asked his wife, Naomi, to take him to the hospital, a five-minute drive away.
They arrived at the Sussex Health Centre at 8:48 p.m., but the hospital in southern New Brunswick had closed 18 minutes earlier — the result of a "temporary" change made two years ago.
Using an intercom, Jordan told a hospital employee that he thought he was having a heart attack. "And they said, 'Well, we're closed. So if you want, I can call 911 for you,'" Jordan, 49, said in a recent interview from his home in Piccadilly, N.
B., recalling how he had to retreat to the parking lot, pain radiating through his jaw, elbows and ears. It was 9:24 p.
m. by the time an ambulance arrived. At the hospital in Saint John, 75 kilometres away, Jordan was immediately taken to an operating room where two stents were inserted into arteries leading from his heart.
The couple is now calling on the provincial government to do something about hospitals that are having to close early. Horizon Health Network, which oversees the Sussex Health Centre, did not respond to a request for comment. "I was just lying there on the sidewalk in the parking lot," Jordan said.
"I was just in a lot of pain, and I wanted it to stop." He confirmed that two hospital employees in Sussex eventually offered him some nitroglycerine — a drug used to relieve chest pain during a heart attack..