From a Grateful Patient: Dennis Ducklow

Until the first sharp bolt of pain hit him in his side, Dennis Ducklow’s day was passing as what would otherwise be remembered as a pleasant and entirely forgettable Tuesday. He had spent some time with friends and on the drive home, he and his wife stopped at Tim Hortons where he purchased a double double, a rare treat.

“Right after that I started getting this pain,” says Dennis, a photographer and educator who has worked with the Foundation and other organizations around Langley.

“I didn’t finish the coffee.”

Within hours, what he’d waved off as a weird, intense upset stomach became a relentless pain that kept him awake all night.

A full 24 hours later, his wife Joan cried uncle: it was no fun to watch him writhe in pain. She brought Dennis to the Emergency Department at Langley Memorial despite his hesitation - it would likely be a long wait, he insisted.

“The last thing I wanted to do was go to the hospital,” he recalls.

It did turn out to be a long wait. But what he found in that passage of time surprised him. Over the next several hours, he was at the centre of a flurry of activity and attentive care that gave him a new appreciation of the labour and compassion of Langley Memorial Hospital staff.

He watched nurses and other medical staff in full triage mode, moving constantly between patients while preparing him for treatment, balancing urgency, patience and calm under impossible pressure.

“The community has grown beyond the hospital’s capacity. But that doesn’t mean the staff aren’t doing their best. They are doing more than their best in spite of the limitations. They could easily treat people like, ‘Here’s another one, get him through…’

“But there was nothing like that. It was just compassion every step of the way.”

They arrived at 3 p.m. and while they waited, staff were moving him through the early stages of care: taking blood, performing an electrocardiogram and monitoring his blood pressure and oxygen levels.

“Every encounter was a chance to chat a little bit, and every caregiver was smiling and friendly,” he says.

Eventually he was sent for a CT scan. Within an hour he heard his diagnosis: a gallbladder attack. It was time to remove it. With the help of morphine, Dennis spent the night in Emergency in a reclining hallway chair while awaiting surgery. Two days later he underwent a laparoscopic gallbladder removal, a minimally invasive procedure using tiny incisions and a small camera.

It is now the standard of care for gallbladder removal across Canada, and it’s easy to see why. Since laparoscopic techniques became widely available, they have quietly transformed what was once a major surgery into something patients recover from in days rather than weeks, with fewer complications and far less time spent staring at a hospital ceiling. For Dennis, the difference was immediate.

Recovery was swift. After being discharged on a Saturday morning, he and his wife were out for a two-kilometre walk that same afternoon.

“Twenty-four hours after surgery I was able to do that because of the laparoscopic procedure,” he says.

Within two weeks the pain was completely gone, but the memories of the people who cared for him still linger.

“Every single person I encountered made me feel cared for and I’m sincerely grateful to all of them.”

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