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Finally seen

How Langley’s hospital treated me like a person

November 6, 2025

When I entered the emergency room at Langley Memorial Hospital, it was mayhem. I was flailing all over the place in pain, unable to stay still. The ambulance had brought me in, so I bypassed the reception line. As soon as the nurses saw the state I was in, they rushed me to a doctor without hesitation.

In that moment, I didn’t feel judged. I felt genuinely cared for, as if the staff weren’t just trying to ease my pain but determined to understand what was causing it. That kind of compassion was unfamiliar to me.

In Vancouver, where I lived for 42 years before moving to Langley this year, my experiences at St. Paul’s Hospital were a sharp contrast. There, their default was to prescribe me oxycontin, despite me telling them I was allergic to all opioids. Instead of being treated as a patient in pain, I felt reduced to a stereotype — medicated as though I were a drug-seeking Indigenous person. 

I was once asked outright by a doctor at St. Pauls: “Are you a heroin addict?”

I am the great-great-grandchild of Chief Poundmaker from Thunderchild First Nation. 

My experiences in the medical system are shaped by two deeply stigmatized identities: being Indigenous and being someone who is in recovery from addiction. 

The discrimination that I — and many other Indigenous patients — face often begins with assumptions: that we are drug-seeking, that our pain isn’t real, or that if we show distress, we must be in withdrawal.

Canada’s health care system has a well-documented history of systemic racism, where providers frequently assume Indigenous people are alcoholics, drug addicts or incapable of caring for themselves.

Ultimately, my experiences point to a larger societal failure: the health care system’s inability to confront the realities of the substance use, poverty and systemic racism that Indigenous people live with every day. It’s important for us, as Indigenous people, to remember that the feeling of being judged is not a personal flaw, but the weight of colonial stereotypes imposed on us. 

These are colonial stereotypes which fail to look inward at the root — at the dispossession of stolen land; at the trauma inflicted by the residential school system that took our language and culture, and tore our families apart; and the continued attempts at assimilation through the Sixties Scoop and the Millennium Scoop.

Langley Memorial Hospital didn’t just provide the right non-opioid medication to ease my pain; the doctors investigated the cause, ordering an MRI for my spine. Aware of my history with addiction, they gave me enough pain relief to help, but not enough to risk creating another habit. The nurses were friendly and attentive, even earning my trust over time. Before long, we were laughing and joking together — as humans, seen and respected for who we were.

My excruciating back pain would eventually be resolved with hydrocortisone injections. But the relief I felt being seen and heard in a health care setting was equally, if not even more, healing.