Tuesday, Oct 29, 2019 YEARS
140
Since Sept 27, 1879
Retail $2 Home delivered from $1.35
Exhibitions calling P2
THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF MID CANTERBURY
Fed up with politics P10
Motoring Friday,July5,2019
Jenny’s XK8 Jaguar is her dream car.
Local news for local people Mid Canterbury’s only locally-owned daily newspaper FULL STORY P21
Strike action puts people’s lives on hold By Sue Newman
sue.n@theguardian.co.nz
Over the past 10 months Canterbury District Health Board staff have been on strike on 21 occasions. Those strikes have added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the board’s operating costs and they have affected 135 days of hospital work. Those are the facts. But what those days of strike action have also done is to push back surgery dates for hundreds of people, many of whom have been sitting on waiting lists for many months, if not years, for operations that are described as elective but which, in reality, will improve their quality of life. Ask Colleen Linwood. The facts do not tell the human story, she said. Colleen is now looking at her fifth date for surgery, November 5. She says she’s crossing fingers, toes and even eyelashes that nothing steps in the way this time. For her, the wait for a hip replacement has been long, frustrating and painful. It’s carved swathes off her quality of life and makes it impossible for her to work. Pain is her constant companion, pills her only relief, but come November 5, barring another round of strike action, Colleen hopes she’ll finally get a new hip. It’s been a long journey, one that began in 2013. She was in constant pain, struggled to walk and a visit to the doctor sent her off for an X-ray. The results were clear, her hip joint showed severe deterioration, a replacement was needed. But Colleen had one problem standing between her and surgery – she was severely overweight. She
was also well under 50, often cited as the cut-off age for the procedure. “They requested that I lose a lot of weight to get to the right weight before surgery, a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or under,” she said. That meant opting for regular pain killers and a commitment to shed the excess kilos. She tried, struggled to do this on her own, but nothing worked. The weight stayed, the pain stayed and her medication increased. She was forced to leave work and her life became defined by the pain in her hip. In April last year she asked for help, booked into a gym and got serious about weight loss. It worked. She went back through the public health process for acceptance for surgery. Again she was rejected. Yes her BMI had dropped significantly but it was still marginally over the magic figure of 40. “They told me I needed to lose more weight for my own health and I’ve worked extremely hard with the guys at the gym to lose 39kg,” she said. That was in April last year and since then she’s dropped well below the goal and continued to build up her fitness. This year she received the best possible news. She’d finally made it onto the waiting list. Surgery was booked for March 19 Colleen continued to work at the gym, continued doing all she could to get her body into a healthy state for surgery, and started to dream of a new life.
CONTINUED P3
Colleen Linwood’s life is currently on hold due to the urgent need for a hip replacement.
Mid Canterbury. That’s our Heartland. Earn 1.60% p.a. with Heartland’s Direct Call Account. Find out more at heartland.co.nz Direct Call Account terms and conditions apply.
PHOTO SUE NEWMAN 251019-SN-0059
Ph 03 307 7900 to subscribe!