One year after latest elbow break, Winnipeg woman faces long wait for care

A Winnipeg woman living in chronic pain is at her wit’s end.

After more than half a dozen unsuccessful surgeries over the course of 24 years to repair a broken arm, Cindy Myskiw is once again left waiting to receive additional care.

“People should be seen way faster and looked after way faster than what they are,” Myskiw said.

Myskiw’s elbow issues began in 2001, when she broke it and had it replaced.

Since then, she’s had multiple surgeries to try to correct the chronic breakage of her elbow replacement. The latest: from August last year. After eight months of waiting for a replacement part to come from overseas, she finally had surgery in March.

But she says when the doctor opened up her arm to operate, he had to close her back up.

“It was broken way more than my surgeon thought it was,” Myskiw said.

After the surgery, Myskiw says she was bleeding through her bandages for days, requiring long waits at Concordia Hospital. She even had the metal rod in her arm poke through her skin, which led to a 10th surgery just a few days after that.

About six weeks later, her arm started showing discoloration. Myskiw says she was told it would likely never go away due to trauma her arm has sustained.

While her pain has mostly lessened, Myskiw still has little use of her arm, making everyday tasks hard to accomplish on her own.

“I do have to use it, my left hand, to move it and put it in position,” she said. “Different positions. I can move it slightly but not fully on its own.

“I went back to my doctor and I says, ‘Listen, I can’t live like this for the rest of my life.’”

The Winnipeg woman is now waiting for a referral to the Mayo Clinic in the United States, but has no idea how long it will take to get approved or to be able to have her next surgery.

“Now I’m at a standstill again of waiting for them to approve me so I can get down there,” she said.

“Right now, I feel like I’m right back to when I first broke it.”

When CityNews spoke to Myskiw in December 2024, Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said their office was in contact with Myskiw to ensure she gets the care she needs. Myskiw’s last update was a letter from the minister’s office Tuesday, saying her email was referred to the Department of Health for a more comprehensive written response.

“They’re not as supportive as they should be,” Myskiw said. “We’ve lost a lot of our health care.”

RELATED: Winnipeg woman living with ‘so much pain’ waiting for yet another elbow surgery

In a statement Thursday, Minister Asagwara told CityNews their office is working with surgical leadership to follow up on her latest correspondence.

“In this specific case, the delay is due to a specialized part that must be sourced from Italy,” the statement reads. “Due to federal regulatory requirements, this device must go through an approval process each time it is imported. It is the responsibility of the company exporting it to Canada to complete that process.

“Unfortunately, these sorts of delays are beyond the control of the patient, their care team, or the province, but we remain committed to ensuring cases like Cindy’s move forward as quickly as possible within the established process and we will stay in contact with Cindy to provide updates.

“Our government is taking action to reduce surgical wait times by adding capacity in Manitoba’s operating rooms and recruiting and retaining surgical staff.”

Myskiw is hoping the province can advocate for expedited approval and treatment so she can finally regain use of her arm again.

“People don’t realize just how hard it is to not have a limb. And you don’t realize it until you’ve lost it, just how much you use it.”

Myskiw’s surgical timeline

It all began on Nov. 19, 2001, when Myskiw tripped over a wheelbarrow handle and broke her elbow while she was living in the RM of Alexander.

“The moment of impact, I knew I broke it,” she recalled. “It was just instantaneous pain.”

She went to Pine Falls Hospital for a splint and was transferred to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, where she waited two days on a gurney in the hallway before having her first surgery.

“That was literally the start of hallway medicine,” she said. “I waited in the hall for two days, literally sleeping on a gurney in a hallway before I got seen. And now, you’re back to the same thing. But it’s worse because they’re not leaving people in the hallway, they’re just not getting in.”

When her staples were removed, she found the surgeon had sewed the bone, leaving her in excruciating pain with her arm stuck in a right angle and unable to rotate her hand.

A second surgery in May 2002 did not improve her pain level or range of movement. The next surgery, in February 2003, left her with no pain and a range of motion that was near-to-normal. It was supposed to give her a decade of relief.

But she began to hear crunching sounds in her elbow some five years later, and ultimately underwent three more surgeries between 2009 and 2014.

The seventh surgery took place in August 2023, when she had her elbow replaced with a plastic part ordered from Italy, after she waited seven months for the part to arrive.

A year later – in August 2024 – Myskiw was simply putting lotion on her face when she heard a loud snap. The snap was her metal elbow breaking.

An X-ray revealed the elbow piece completely separated from her arm. The surgeon’s office initially refused to cast her arm, and so did the hospital. The surgeon eventually agreed to cast it.