Thursday marked the fourth day of hearings of coroner Julie-Kim Godin's public inquiry into the suicide of Amélie Champagne, a 22-year-old Montrealer who suffered from Lyme disease.
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Amélie Champagne refused to spend another night on a stretcher in the psychiatric emergency room, a doctor said at the Hôtel-Dieu de Sherbrooke, where she was hospitalized after attempting suicide in September 2022.
The young woman, who had Lyme disease and was due to be transferred to a hospital in Montreal, took her own life a few days later.
On the morning of September 8, 2022, one day after his suicide attempt and his admission to the psychiatric emergency room at the Hôtel-Dieu, Dr. Khashayar Asli to apply for preventive or inpatient care because the state of Amélie Champagne even worried her when she claimed that she no longer had suicidal thoughts.
“She told me that she was the daughter of the president of the Jean Coutu pharmacies and wanted to leave. “I told her that even if she was the daughter of the President of the United States, I wouldn’t let her go,” he said.
Since the 22-year-old young woman refused to be hospitalized in Sherbrooke, he requested that she be transferred to a facility in Montreal, where she lives, to ensure rapid treatment and continuity of care.
On the same day, the head nurse of the psychiatric emergency room at Notre-Dame Hospital was called.
“It is very rare that we refuse, especially if the patient lives in the area of our population service,” testified department head Stéphane Proulx. The transfer request was accepted, but as our units were overcrowded and there were five general emergency patients waiting on stretchers, we requested a delay of 24 to 48 hours so that we could get back to them.
The Hôtel-Dieu's on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Nazim Nekrouf, is still waiting for confirmation of the transfer the next day, Friday September 9th, and will try to convince the young patient to stay in the emergency room for another 24 hours. She wanted to adjust her medication to relieve her symptoms , but refused after spending two nights on a stretcher.
Her parents will take her home that evening after contacting a psychiatrist at the Montreal University Hospital Center to ensure she can see an outpatient doctor early the following week.
On Sunday, September 11, 2022, two days after leaving the psychiatric emergency room at the Hôtel-Dieu, Amélie Champagne, who had suffered from severe symptoms of Lyme disease for years, took her own life.
Dr. Stéphane Proulx wanted to address Amélie's parents and tell them “that after reading her story and seeing her photo, [il] was hoping to do something for her. Amélie was much more than a file number, a number that unfortunately we never had at Notre-Dame Hospital.”
Coroner Julie-Kim Godin's public inquest continues tomorrow at the Montreal courthouse with testimony from four more experts.