His passion was saving others as a volunteer firefighter whose work in the United States earned him the nickname “Canada.”

But when 41-year-old Stephen Charlton needed saving himself after he says he twice tried to kill himself in the psychiatric ward of Victoria Hospital, officials there turned their backs on him, kicking him out two days after Christmas.

Charlton says he was booted after hospital staff phoned police and wrongly accused him of trying to sell drugs. After police refused to charge him, hospital staff kicked him out anyway, he said.

Hospital officials refuse to comment about Charlton, saying they are obligated to protect the privacy of patients.

But London police have told The Free Press they were called to the hospital Dec. 27, that they investigated criminal allegations and concluded they had no basis for laying charges.

London Health Sciences Centre officials have refused to answer questions about Charlton’s claims — among other things, he alleges hospital staff allowed him to gain access to drugs he used to try to kill himself.

“Due to privacy legislation, we cannot speak to specifics regarding any individual. While our volume and wait time realities are clearly not what any of us would like to see here at LHSC or at the hospitals across the province experiencing similar pressures, we are committed to providing safe and high-quality care to every patient we treat,” Julie Trpkovski, a vice president who oversees mental health, emergency services and the flow of patients, wrote to The Free Press.

But Charlton and his family are speaking out.

Born in Norwich and raised in Woodstock, Charlton learned a love for saving others from his father Larry. Together they volunteered for St. John’s Ambulance.

Later, he left Oxford County to volunteer for an American rescue service, his last of three stops taking him to the busy suburbs of Washington D.C. in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The Laurel Volunteer Rescue Squad has seen many volunteers come and go, with as many as 130 at any one time.

While Charlton last worked there a decade ago, the current chief still recalls him well for his work, engaging personality and sense of humour.

“We used to call him Canada,” said Michael Haggerty, the chief of Laurel Volunteer Rescue Squad.

Charlton lived at squad headquarters for between two and four years, getting free rent in return for volunteering night and weekends. During a typical weekend shift, Charlton would have worked as many as 40 hours responding to 30 or 40 calls, lifting patients, many of them obese, down the staircases of apartment building that could have as many as eight storeys.

“It’s vigorous,” Haggerty said.

Charlton’s descent to the psychiatric ward began about eight years ago with a diagnosis of diabetes after medication failed to prevent two severe complications: Extreme pain brought on by nerve damage and frequent blackouts caused by spikes in blood sugars.

The pain has become so extreme, Charlton sometimes can’t walk the few steps from his bed in east London to his bathroom. The blackouts are so frequent, he says he’s been rushed to London ERs 34 times the last few years.

His diabetes has proved so incapacitating that his elderly mother moved in with him and his common-law wife, who has medical challenges of her own: she has a blood cancer called multiple myeloma.

“He tries to put on a brave face for me, but I hear him at night (in his bedroom downstairs) crying,” 67-year-old Jeanne Charlton said.

Unable to work or even look after his most basic needs, Charlton says he has become suicidal and first tried to kill himself in July, 2016, while he was an in-patient being treated for diabetes at University Hospital. He says he told a psychiatric team there he was feeling suicidal, then asked them to tell nurses to stop leaving prescriptions unattended on medication carts and to stop using the same password for all the carts.

A day or two later, Charlton says he used that simple, easy-to-guess password to take insulin from a medication cart and try to kill himself. That attempt left him unconscious and led to his first visit to the psychiatric ward at Victoria, he says. Hospital officials say there is ongoing work to change the passwords.

While several weeks later he was discharged, he continued to suffer with suicidal thoughts and unrelenting pain.

“As a firefighter I could carry someone on my shoulder. Now, I can’t take two steps from my bed to the bathroom,” he said. “I used to be an alpha male. (Now I) don’t even feel like a man.”

Charlton sought mental health care in the community through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, then, in early December, was taken to Victoria Hospital, at first because his blood sugars were sky high.

Hospital staff later moved him to the psychiatric ward after a doctor signed a form that gave medical staff authority over Charlton because he was at risk of harming himself or others, using what is called a Form 3, Charlton said. Once there, he says he tricked a nurse into giving him two insulin pens that are supposed to be locked up at the nurses’ station, telling her he was speaking on his cellphone to his pharmacist who needed to know the prescription numbers so he could renew them.

The nurse handed him the two pens and watched as he dialed each to the maximum dose, injected himself in the stomach, and then did same twice more before the nurse stopped him, Charlton said.

The overdose prompted a move to a medicine ward, but once he recovered, he was moved again to the psychiatric ward. Once there, he says he tried to kill himself again, raising the head of his bed using automatic controls, placing his head underneath, his neck over a metal bar, before he used controls to lower the bed. Charlton said he wanted to suffocate himself.

Another patient’s screams drew staff who saved him.

It was after this last suicide attempt that Charlton said he struck a deal with his treating psychiatrist — Charlton would not try to kill himself while he waited for his application he had submitted to arrange for a doctor-approved assisted death, what Ontario calls its Medical Assistance in Dying program.

On Christmas day, the hospital issued Charlton a day pass so he could go home to spend the holiday with his family. But when he returned later that day to the psychiatric ward, he snuck in a straight razor and a few old fentanyl patches that had been prescribed to him to manage pain — what he describes now as his “backup plan” if the assisted dying program rejected his request.

Hospital security later found both, staff accused him of possessing and distributing illegal drugs and they phoned police.

But police did not charge Charlton, he said, because the patches had been prescribed to him, he never tried to sell them and he had threatened no one but himself.

Records at the London court house show no criminal convictions for Charlton.

After police decided not to lay charges, hospital officials kicked him out Dec. 27, Charlton said.

“It makes no sense. Someone is suicidal and you kick them out on the streets,” he said.

Back at home, he was a wreck, his family scared he would kill himself.

“It’s tearing me apart,” Jeanne Charlton said. “I hate to hear him talking about wanting to die because he’s in so much pain. It’s just killing him.”

His family believes staff are pressured to get patients out of the chronically over-crowded psychiatric ward to ease the nearly week-long queue of patients in the ER waiting for a ward bed.

“I think they were bed clearing and using (drug allegations) as an excuse,” Charlton’s common-law wife Crystal Hoy said.

After Charlton was kicked out of the hospital, it was Hoy who phoned Woodstock General Hospital, which then called London police, who arrived at their doorstep Dec. 29 — London police confirm they went that day to Charlton’s home address.

Police drove Charlton to meet at a coffee shop with the mobile crisis team for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, then drove him back to Victoria Hospital. “Police were very nice,” he said.

This time, hospital staff placed Charlton is a secure, concrete room in the emergency department, where he waited with little human contact for six days. Staff told him he needed to be moved to the most secure part of the psychiatric ward, its critical care unit, and that 21 other patients in the ER were ahead of him in the queue, Charlton said.

But after Charlton told staff he had spoken on his cellphone to a Free Press reporter, they confiscated his phone and quickly moved him to the psychiatric critical care unit, he and his family said. Neither family nor friends were allowed to see him, they say.

He remained confined in the psychiatric critical care unit for eight days and was only released, and allowed home, after a social worker intervened, he says.

jsher@postmedia.com

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If you need help:

Canadian Mental Health Association Oxford: 24-hour crisis and outreach service: 519-539-8342 or 1-877-339-8342, or go to cmhaoxford.on.ca.

Mental Health Crisis Service: (16 and older): ­519-433-2023

Walk-in Mental Health and Addictions Crisis Centre: 24 hours, 648 Huron St., London