Sudbury emergency room finds itself at the frontline of opioid crisis

Doctors in the emergency room at Health Sciences North get an adrenaline rush when they bring a patient "back to life" after an opioid overdose.

But Alex Anawati, who has worked in the Sudbury ER for eight years, says it isn't usually a cause for celebration.

"There is an eerie silence usually in the room because we know it's another iteration of a story that we've seen over and over," he says.

Anawati says every shift he sees someone touched by opioids.

Sometimes it's an overdose, with about 50 coming into the emergency department every month.

But often it's someone being treated for the complications of their addiction.

"They become my regulars. They remember me, I remember them. What's really sad about that is we are the ones that they are around through all these health complications and their early deaths. We watch them die through the repeated visits to the emerg," says Anawati. 

"So we see a lot of people struggling through this. We see their desperation, we see their shame, we see their embarrassment."

Dr. Rob Lepage has worked in the Sudbury ER for 30 years and has watched as more and more of the patients come in because of addiction.

He too has noticed more patients with serious infections to their spine and heart caused by injection drugs. 

"I've started asking almost everybody these days that has back pain 'Have you ever used intravenous drugs?' And that's not something I would have asked routinely 10 years ago," says Lepage.

"When you see 25-year-olds, their heart valves are totally damaged and some of the surgeons say 'I'm not sure I can fix this' and they're 25 years old. That's tragic."

Dr. Laura Piccinin sees the opioid crisis from two different angles.

She sees patients wrestling with addiction in the emergency room and she sees the end results in her work as a coroner in Sudbury.

Piccinin remembers one patient who came in with an overdose, was discharged and had overdosed before her shift in the ER was over.

"Sometimes it's hard to not feel like we've failed people when they get to that point. And so the least I can do given that that's where they're at is to try to help them through it and keep them alive so that they can get some real help," she says.

"To see if we can bring some of these people back, before they end up in the body bag."

One of the main ways the hospital emergency department is doing that is by prescribing Suboxone, a drug that helps reduce withdrawal symptoms after an addict stops taking opioids.

Hear more about that and hear more of the first-hand stories from the ER in this documentary: