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Bursary will honour the man he was Cornelia Naylor staff reporter
A local family wants their son to be remembered for the loyal, big-hearted young man he was – not for the disease that ended his life one year ago today. Mark Hague graduated from Burnaby North Secondary in 2009. He was a confident guy and a loyal friend, brother and son. A natural-born leader, he had won a leadership award at Holy Cross Elementary in Grade 7 and later took on a part-time job teaching ice-skating lessons to kids for the City of Burnaby. As an athlete, playing rep soccer, minor ice hockey and minor lacrosse, he always wore either a captain’s C or an assistant captain’s A on his chest. He was a leader among his friends as well. “His friends really looked up to him,” his mom Marcella said. “If there was ever a problem, he was the go-to guy.” That’s just the way Mark was, she said. “Some kids are just more confident than others, and he was just one of them.” Before Mark died, however, that confidence was to be shattered almost beyond recognition in a battle against drug addiction – a struggle that ended in a fatal overdose one year ago today. “That wasn’t Mark,” Marcella said, her tears coming suddenly. “It’s a tragedy. It’s a horrible tragedy. That kid had so much going on for him, but the disease strangled him. He told me, ‘Mom, I hate my life.’ He Bursary Page 8
Cornelia Naylor/BURNABY NOW
Remembering the good: Burnaby parents Mike and Marcella Hague hold a photo of their son Mark, who died a year ago today, and whose memory will be honoured with a mentorship bursary at Burnaby North Secondary.
Burnaby has longest wait lists in the region For knees, gall bladders and hernias, it’s four times longer Cornelia Naylor staff reporter
Burnaby is not the place you want to blow out your knee. Local residents looking to get their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) fixed wait an
average of nine months – or more than four times – longer than the provincial average, according B.C. Ministry of Health data. They also wait more than four times longer to get their gall bladders removed and their hernias repaired. Overall, Burnaby Hospital has the longest waits for adult elective surgery in the Lower Mainland, and they could get even longer after a Fraser Health decision to delay elective surgeries in the health region
in January and February to avoid operating room budget overruns. Surgeries during the last two months of the fiscal year, which ended in March, were set to outpace budgets, so cases at some hospitals were delayed and bumped into the next budget cycle. “We have a budget given to us every year, and with that we have so many surgical cases, so we monitor that all the time,” Fraser Health executive director of surgery
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Judith Hockney told the NOW. Will that mean an increase in wait times? “If [surgeons] are seeing more people than we can do in the budgeted cycle, your waitlist will grow,” she said. The median wait time (or number of weeks it takes to complete 50 per cent of cases) for all adult elective surgeries at
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