For more than two months, a Woodbridge woman has been keeping vigil by her husband’s bedside in a U.S. hospital while trying to get him moved back home.

But Kokila Joshi is being told by hospital after hospital in the GTA that there are no beds here. Even her insurance company has had no luck getting her husband, Bipinderoy, repatriated.

The hospitals accept that there’s a problem, saying the flu season has overwhelmed their already strained capacity. But so far nobody has been able to do anything about Joshi’s plight.

Bipinderoy Joshi, 67, suffered a cardiac arrest while on vacation in St. Louis, Missouri on Dec. 8. He has been in the SSM St. Joseph Health Center ever since.

Kokila Joshi flew to St. Louis the day after her husband fell sick. Herself a nurse, she said she has been so stressed by the situation that she suffered a heart attack, on Dec. 21, and was hospitalized in the same facility for three days.

Ontario’s health ministry and the four hospitals the Joshi family contacted won’t say much about the case, citing privacy. But they all acknowledge Ontario’s hospital system is under stress.

“If we had a bed available to safely accommodate this patient, we would do so,” said York Central hospital spokesperson Elizabeth Barnett.

“This flu season has overwhelmed hospitals and we have to take our patients who are in the emerg first,” said Scarborough Hospital spokesperson Tracy Huffman.

“The challenge is our ICU beds are very full . . . There is not a lot of surge capacity within the whole system and that is a challenge,” said Dr. Ian Fraser, chief of staff at Toronto East General Hospital.

Indeed, an emergency was declared in Windsor earlier this week because hospitals there are so full.

As for the province? Even the health ministry says it can’t help.

“We are relieved that he does have some private insurance that he is able to rely on . . . but as far as critical care capacity and those types of things, it is difficult for us to do anything,” said health ministry spokesman Andrew Morrison.

After his cardiac arrest, Bipinderoy Joshi was in a coma for almost a month. He had a tracheotomy and now breathes with the help of a ventilator. He is being fed through a gastric feeding tube. His wife, Kokila, is uncertain about the level of neurological damage he may have suffered, although he’s now awake and able to follow simple commands.

Typically patients like this are first transferred to an intensive care bed in an acute care hospital and then, once stabilized, moved to a rehabilitation hospital.

So Kokila Joshi tried to have her husband transferred directly to a rehab hospital in the GTA, the West Park Healthcare Centre, to no avail. West Park spokesperson Vince Rice said the facility typically only takes referrals from local hospitals familiar with its transfer protocol, which requires that a comprehensive medical assessment be done first.

Meantime, Patty Faith, spokesperson for the Joshi’s insurance provider Medavie Blue Cross — which is picking up the costs for his stay in the U.S. hospital — would only say the company is “on standby to repatriate him.”

Kokila Joshi continues to stay by her husband’s side. She has been bunking with relatives in St. Louis, and their three adult children have all made trips there to see their father.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“We have waited 10 weeks here and there is no indication of when we can go home. We are Canadian citizens, we pay taxes. Why are they declining him?” she said.

In desperation, Kokila has even sent a letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty, pleading for help: “Please kindly look into this case and find an ICU bed for my husband. We are away from my work, my family and my home.”

tboyle@thestar.ca