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Brenda died early Thursday at the age of 89. Her care plan had worked well until Monday, when her pain suddenly intensified, her grieving daughter said.

Nurses from a palliative community team had been visiting Brenda regularly, but when Bucci phoned them to ask that her mother’s pain medication be increased, she was told they checked with a doctor and could not help because her mother was not technically a palliative patient. They suggested her mother be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but she was in too much pain to be moved.

It was upsetting and confusing for the distraught family.

“No one should ever, at that stage — I just didn’t need that. I was emotional,” said Bucci, a retired registered nurse. “We took for granted that we’d have access to someone to manage her pain.”

With the help of a pharmacist, the family got Brenda through Monday night and eventually got the help they needed from the palliative-care system on Tuesday.

Bucci and her sisters have faced many decisions and dilemmas regarding their mother’s care — as have thousands of other families — as they tried to navigate B.C.’s complicated, expensive and underfunded seniors care system.

It’s a system that will become even more over-burdened and difficult to access as the province’s population aged 65 and older is projected to skyrocket from 916,500 this year to more than 1.6 million by 2040, when one out of every four people in B.C. will be a senior.