Haida elder in 'extreme' appendicitis pain was allegedly released from B.C. hospital without treatment

This story is part of a series examining systemic discrimination against Indigenous patients within the nursing profession in B.C. To read Part 1 of the series, click here.

By the time Penny Kerrigan arrived at Mills Memorial Hospital in northern British Columbia, she says the morphine she'd been given before her medevac flight from Haida Gwaii had worn off.

"I was in extreme pain," said the Haida elder, who served as B.C.'s community liaison officer for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

She'd been flown to the hospital in Terrace, B.C., from her home community of Old Masset on Oct. 19, 2020, after a doctor told her she needed a CT scan to determine the cause of her severe stomach pain.

Kerrigan didn't know it then, but she was suffering from appendicitis that would soon require emergency surgery.

However, instead of receiving a CT scan or any diagnosis for the painful and potentially fatal condition, Kerrigan says she was discharged from hospital into an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night.

She alleges she was treated roughly and dismissively by the nurses she saw, was refused prescription pain medication and given only regular-strength Tylenol to deal with her discomfort.

"I have been to many different hospitals," she said. "I've never — never — experienced anything like that."

Kerrigan filed a human rights complaint against Northern Health over her treatment that day, alleging anti-Indigenous discrimination by the doctors and nurses she encountered.

In July, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal released a decision approving the health authority's application to add the doctor who saw Kerrigan that night as a defendant.

Kerrigan spoke to CBC as part of a series about anti-Indigenous racism within nursing, and how the province's largest regulator of health professionals, the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives, says it's trying to address that pervasive problem.

She said education on the history of Canada's discriminatory, oppressive and abusive policies regarding Indigenous people needs to be a priority for anyone who wants to be a nurse, along with training and accountability to wipe out dangerous stereotypes.

"Maybe because I came from an Indigenous community … I felt that they thought that I was drug seeking," Kerrigan said of her experience in the hospital in Terrace, a small city around 700 kilometres northwest of Vancouver.

"How could they do this to me? How could they do it to anybody? It doesn't matter what colour your skin is."