Alanna McDonald still remembers the exact moment she got the call from her doctor’s office — 3:55 p.m. — asking her to come in for the results of her MRI.
Almost two years after she began having migraines, blurry vision and facial numbness, she found out she had an acoustic neuroma — a type of brain tumour — and it had grown to three centimetres in diameter.
“I was like, ‘oh my God.’ Then it really kind of hit me,” she said in an interview with The St. John’s Morning Show.
Now, the St. John’s chiropractor and mother of three is facing major brain surgery, which she believes could have been avoided if she had been able to get an MRI when her symptoms first developed almost two years ago.
In spring 2022, McDonald was getting lunch with her husband when her vision went blurry for the first time and she became dizzy.
“It freaked me out,” she said.
Her family doctor, worried about retinal detachment, sent her to see an optometrist, who didn’t find anything abnormal. McDonald then started to get migraines and developed facial numbness.
McDonald said her family doctor believed she needed an MRI, but in Newfoundland and Labrador family physicians can’t order that test.
“Through the whole process…she did everything she could do. She did every test she could do, she sent me to every specialist that I could see. Really, her hands were kind of tied,” she said.
Her doctor referred her to an ENT specialist. That specialist didn’t find anything abnormal, but did schedule a non-urgent MRI appointment. It was January 2023, and McDonald was told it would take two years to get an appointment.
Meanwhile, her symptoms got worse, and medications prescribed by her doctor weren’t helping. She got tinnitus and lost some hearing in her left ear
Her doctor sent her back to the ENT, who confirmed that she had slight hearing loss
“They had already ordered the MRI, so they said, like, ‘there’s not much more we can do.'”
Brain surgery
Last summer, her migraines got worse. Her doctor told her to ask for the appointment to be moved up. She called the health authority and was put on a cancellation list.
McDonald was finally able to get the MRI in January — and two days later, found out she had a brain tumour.
Now, McDonald is scheduled for brain surgery in Halifax later in March.
“I go through moments of panic and denial,” she said. “I just pretend it’s not happening.”
The surgery takes 14-16 hours, and she’ll need to stay in hospital for a week afterwards. She’ll be permanently deaf in her left ear, and there’s risk of other complications, like Bell’s palsy. She said the tumour has grown too big for less invasive treatments; surgery is usually a last resort.
McDonald believes she could have availed of those less invasive options if she had gotten the MRI sooner.
“The fact that my outcome could have been different is really what gets me,” she said.
McDonald, a chiropractor and president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Chiropractic Association, was ordered to stop working. Her mother helps looks after her kids, all under age 10.
A ‘typical Newfoundland story’
In a statement, N.L. Health Services spokesperson Mikaela Etchegary said MRI appointments are prioritized as emergent, urgent or non-urgent based on guidelines from the Canadian Association of Radiologists and clinical standards in Alberta and British Columbia.
Current wait times for non-urgent MRIs in Newfoundland and Labrador vary from 125 to 427 days, based on the patient and where they live.
According to the statement, N.L. Health Services sets aside appointments each day with emergency or urgent outpatient requests, and unused slots can be filled by non-urgent cases.
The health authority would not comment on McDonald’s case specifically.
McDonald said she tries to not get angry about her situation.
“It’s a typical Newfoundland story. It’s a typical wait time. I actually got in a little bit earlier because I called and I pushed for it. And that’s the sad thing to me, is that … our system is so shitty right now that I just feel like that is a typical story, and there’s nothing special about it,” she said.
Another MRI machine coming to Corner Brook
In an interview on Tuesday, Health Minister Tom Osborne said there are some plans underway to increase MRI access in Newfoundland and Labrador. For example, a new machine at the Western Memorial Hospital in Corner Brook will bring the total number of MRI machines in the province to six.
Osborne said adding more MRI referrers — like family doctors — could add to the wait times because more patients could be referred for exams.
Tom Osborne says there are plans in the works to reduce wait times for MRIs. Newfoundland and Labrador’s health minister was responding directly to the revelation that a woman who had to wait two years for the scan was diagnosed with a brain tumour and now needs surgery.
Osborne said N.L. Health Services is planning to increase the number of hours for non-urgent MRI scans to 15 per day. He said the health authority will also give patients the option to travel to less busy locations.
Osborne said he’s asked the health authority to develop a plan to address wait times and create additional capacity for MRIs. That will include a central intake where people will be offered an appointment at a location with the shortest wait time.
He also wants the health authority to look at ways to prevent missed appointments — currently, he said, over five per cent of MRI appointments are no-shows.
“That obviously has an impact on wait times and needing to reschedule those appointments,” he said.
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