Canada's hospital emergency rooms have hit a breaking point. Is it the new normal?

Six days in an overflow stretcher. Beds in storage rooms. Patients dying in their seats.

No, we're not describing an episode of HBO's gritty medical drama The Pitt. These are real-life scenes playing out in Canada's emergency rooms.

From Carbonear, N.L., where a man recently died of a heart attack during a 10-hour wait to see a doctor, to Calgary, where a woman pleaded "please don't let me die" during the hours she bled onto a stretcher in the ER, hospitals are bursting at the seams as backlogs and access issues affect patient flow.

"I think we're close to the breaking point," Dr. Margot Burnell, the president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), told CBC News.

The issue for emergency departments is that they can't control who comes through their doors, said Burnell, a medical oncologist in Saint John, N.B. ERs are not only seeing increased numbers, but the patients that come through are also more medically complex.

This means longer wait-times both to see a doctor and to get a bed when a patient is admitted, Burnell explained. "Patient care, unfortunately, is being affected."

In Winnipeg, some patients are waiting 20 hours or more to receive care. On Thursday afternoon, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa had an estimated wait time of 15 hours and 47 minutes for non-urgent patients; in Summerside, P.E.I., the estimated wait time for non-urgent patients on Wednesday was more than 10 hours.

Meanwhile, the latest statistics published by Ontario Health show that patients who came to an ER in January and were admitted to hospital spent on average 20.3 hours in the emergency department before getting a bed in a ward. The average time spent on a stretcher in ERs across Quebec on Tuesday was 18 hours.

Doctors in Alberta have called for the province to declare a state of emergency over the overcrowding affecting emergency rooms, calling the situation a "crisis state."

On March 3, Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC) posted a message on Facebook. "The care you receive may look a little different in the coming weeks," the message warned before going on to explain that KHSC had just recorded its highest number of admitted inpatients ever.

The post went on to warn about long wait times and noted that some patients "may be assigned to a bed in an unconventional space."

The week before, the hospital admitted 636 patients in one day, far beyond the 570 beds it had available, KHSC CEO Dr. David Pichora told CBC News at the time. He said that they were holding patients in sun rooms, the gym, storage rooms and hallways.

Kingston is far from alone. Recently, a patient in Corner Brook, N.L., described spending six days on an overflow stretcher in a windowless room, while another described spending three days on a stretcher in "a little nook in the hallway where they store towels and blankets."

In January, patients in Calgary detailed harrowing experiences waiting to be seen in ERs, including a woman who waited hours to be seen for a life-threatening postpartum hemorrhage as blood pooled beneath her.