Sun Peaks pushing province to pay for heart-attack medication after saving Australian skier

SUN PEAKS, B.C. — Pete Norman has been coming to Sun Peaks for the last decade.

However, after one of his runs on a recent trip to the ski resort, Norman started to feel some pain.

“I stopped halfway and to me it was a sore tooth. I thought, ‘That’s nothing. It’s just a bit of cold air with your mouth open.’ By the time I got to the condo, that’s when I realized I had some pain in the chest,” he remembers.

After a half hour of constant pain, he walked over to the Sun Peaks Health Centre.

“After about five minutes, they finally grabbed me and took me around to the back and that’s when [Dr. Shane Barclay] started doing his magic for me.”

Family physician at the centre Dr. Barclay added, “I was seeing a patient in [ski] patrol next door. Front-end staff came to me and said ‘We have a gentleman at the front that has jaw and chest pain.’ I said, ‘He’s probably having a heart attack. Bring him back here.’”

“[Pete] came through that door and he was holding his chest. I thought, ‘Hmm, not a good sign.’ We got him onto the stretcher here and first thing I did was got his shirt off and had to shave his chest because he had a little hair on there.”

Dr. Barclay then drew up a vile of tenecteplase or TNK, a clot-busting medication that is used to dissolve blood clots.

“He agreed that he’d be willing to take that. We gave that and his pain started to subside. By the time we got him transported by ambulance down to Royal Inland Hospital, he was pain-free,” he said.

Pete Norman credits the Sun Peaks Health Centre for saving his life after a heart attack (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

Dr. Barclay and Norman credit TNK for keeping him alive.

“I’m very thankful. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t know where I’d be,” said Norman. “Would I be here today? I don’t know.”

Dr. Barclay, having experience saving heart-attack patients before, has been stocking tenecteplase for years at the health centre.

It’s $3,200 per dose, but it’s paid for by the municipality. He says it’s a medication the province should be providing to all rural health centres that are an hour or more from the nearest hospital.

“Our problem is we’re 45 minutes from Kamloops from having a crew available — if there’s one available — and there’s a certain window within which you want to give this medication. The shorter the timeline and the window, the better the outcome,” noted Dr. Barclay. “That’s why I want it available here.”

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix says tenecteplase is provided in hospitals and ambulances in B.C., but told CFJC Today he’s open to having conversations about providing the medication at rural settings like Sun Peaks.

“It may be the case in a particular community that deploying the drug everywhere, when you’re using it primarily in hospitals and in ambulance response, might not be the best approach, but we’re open to suggestions all the time,” said Dix.

Sun Peaks will continue to stock the medication — in the hopes of saving people like Norman — but feels it shouldn’t be the ones paying for it.