How leaving home for medical care has changed the lives of these northerners

The CBC’s Trailbreaker with Shannon Scott is broadcasting live from Edmonton today from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. MT on CBC Radio One. Monday's show is dedicated to the stories of people who’ve had to leave home for medical care and the people who support them through that. This article is a preview of some of those stories. Download the CBC Listen app here to listen live.

It’s been more than a year since Meghan Ipana relocated to Edmonton to be by her daughter’s side in hospital, but she says it’s still difficult being away from home in Inuvik, N.W.T.

For a while, it was just Meghan and her two-year-old daughter, Lillian, in Edmonton, away from her husband and two older daughters.

“I had to care for an infant by myself. It was the worst moment of my life and I had no one there with me,” Ipana said.

Lillian was born with biliary atresia, a rare newborn liver disease where bile ducts are blocked, causing bile to build up and cause damage in the liver. She received a liver transplant last year, but she’s still too frail to return home. 

“I miss the people. I miss my family, my husband's family. I miss the quiet. I'm a nurse, so I miss my hospital and all of my patients,” Ipana said. 

The city is loud and exhausting for her, too, and it’s not a life she wanted for herself or her children. Ipana said she has even more empathy for what patients in the North have to go through to receive medical care.

“Now I have a visceral understanding of what it means to be lonely, what it means to be overwhelmed, what it means to be exhausted all the time,” she said. 

Many northerners have to fly thousands of kilometres south for care. Leaving home for treatment can also completely change people’s lives, like it did for James Howard. He lived in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, for more than two decades until he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma — a cancer of plasma cells. It’s a condition that he said requires 24/7 care.

“My life was there, so when I was told that I was never going back, it was like a part of me was taken,” Howard said. 

“The sad thing is that I'll never be allowed to go back to Cambridge Bay because we don’t have that kind of support in the town,” he said.

Howard had previously applied to get a second escort from his family to be with him while he’s receiving care, but he said that medical travel was denied because he was down in Edmonton for too long. 

“I have to choose between my daughter or my partner. When my partner’s here, she wants to work, but she has to work part-time so she can look after me. My daughter, she has to make choices, whether it’s work or look after her dad full-time,” he said. 

If both his daughter and partner were with him, Howard said they’d be able to work and alleviate some of the financial pressure.