In April, a Quebec court ordered a Montreal hospital to keep a woman on life support machine to enable her husband time to arrange for her to be sent home to die in Nigeria.
McGill University Health Centre sought permission earlier this year to stop all the 42-year-old woman’s treatments and give her palliative care after concluding she had no chance of neurological recovery.
Her husband opposed the change, asking the hospital to keep his wife alive long enough for her to be transferred home to Nigeria at the end of their children’s school year.
Court documents say the Nigerian-born lawyer moved to Montreal with her two children for graduate school in 2021 and had no health concerns until she suddenly took ill and collapsed in a hospital emergency room in July 2023. The document says she experienced “a prolonged cardiorespiratory arrest, requiring resuscitation, and reanimation achieved after a prolonged period.
Her husband, who flew from Nigeria to be at her side, argued that his wife did not have family in Quebec, that she hadn’t planned to stay there and that she would have wanted to return to Nigeria if given the choice.
The hospital and a doctor argued repatriation was against the patient’s best interest and would likely cost the husband more than $150,000 and that “some might argue that, in the meantime, another patient is being deprived of a place and care in hospital,” according to the decision.
A superior Court Justice, Florence Lucas sided with the husband, writing in a recently published decision that the benefits of the hospital’s plan did not outweigh the woman’s fundamental right to live, to be cared for and to pass away in her country.
According to the court document, the transfer had been scheduled for June 28.
The McGill University Health Centre said that for confidentiality reasons, it could not provide further details on the case. In a statement, it said that resorting to judicial arbitration is a last resort when the hospital and patient representative cannot resolve an impasse through other means.