‘Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn’t a heart attack,’ Adam Burgoyne said in a Dec. 5 post on social media. He died the next day
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A Montreal man died one day after he posted on social media about giving up waiting at the hospital for medical attention.
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Adam Burgoyne, 39, passed away on Dec. 6. According to his obituary, he died of an aneurysm.
“Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn’t a heart attack,” Burgoyne said in a Dec. 5 post on the social media platform X that has been viewed 12 million times.
“Not sure what it was, though, because once they were sure I wasn’t dying I was thrown out into the waiting room.”
Six hours later, he gave up and went home.
“Canadian health care, folks,” Burgoyne said in his post.
“Best in the world.”
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Burgoyne even joked about the hospital staff having to shave part of his chest for an electrocardiogram test. “I feel like Samson after his hair was cut.”
He noted the hospital — which is not identified in the post — did not offer to test his blood or take any X-rays. “I suppose that might have happened had I been willing to wait 18 hours more.”
Burgoyne — who said that he didn’t feel panicked at all before the hospital visit – noted he felt pain on the left side of his chest, nausea, and his skin was clammy. “Tried to just breathe a bit and see what happened but it started to get worse so I went to the ER.”
Burgoyne told his followers that he slept most of the day after his hospital visit.
His case has raised already heightened concerns about wait times at Canadian emergency rooms.
“Many emergency rooms across the country are overflowing and patients across Canada are waiting far too long to receive necessary care,” according to a report from the Canadian Medical Association that came out earlier this year. “The scene is not new but unless we make major systemic changes, it will continue to repeat itself.”
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A family member of Burgoyne’s could not be reached for comment.
“We will carry on with his spirit demanding high convictions of all of us,” said Burgoyne’s obituary. “We will carry on without him reluctantly but steadfastly. We will miss him and love him deeply until the end of time.”
We will miss him and love him deeply until the end of time.
His death was sudden, according to Burgoyne’s obituary.
“His many family and friends will miss his sarcastic humour, his quick wit, his deeply felt convictions, his smarts, and his way of cutting through any stormy situation to reveal the core of what really matters,” it said.
“From a young age, Adam took his interests to great depths, teaching himself to play piano, compose classical music, program computers, make chef-worthy feasts for loved ones, and learn French so well that he was consistently mistaken for a native Quebecker. He never did things in half-measures. He was all in.”
Burgoyne, who is originally from Nova Scotia, “loved to laugh and always made us giggle with throwback quotes sourced from an eclectic collection of 90’s cartoons, Monty Python movies, MadTV sketches, childhood memories, and downright ridiculous memes,” said his obituary.
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He had been plagued with addictions, but marked six years “clean and sober” on Oct. 12, it said.
“Adam worked very hard to leave difficult times in the rear view mirror, and succeeded beyond all measure. He had found a loving relationship, rose quickly to great heights in a new career, and proudly showed off the results of his ongoing fitness journey.”
Burgoyne talked about breaking free from his addiction to alcohol and crystal methamphetamine four years ago on the Two For Tea Podcast.
“I have become somewhat of a workaholic in my sobriety,” Burgoyne told the podcast’s host, Iona Italia.
“Yes, I have an addictive personality, and, no that’s not just with regard to substances. If you put a pleasure button in front of me or something that I enjoy doing or just something that strikes my fancy, I’m going to want to push that button a lot more than other people necessarily would. And part of the work that I’ve been doing in recovery is trying to notice when I’m doing this. Trying to steer myself nicely into other things, because learning self-love has been a part of this.”
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His drinking problem, Burgoyne said, started around the age of 22. “I tend to have the type of mind that’s always going a mile a minute and what I liked the most about alcohol was the depressive effects of it. I like feeling numb. I liked not necessarily having 80 thoughts in my head at once. So, I think that although I wouldn’t have told you this at the time — I didn’t think about with it in enough depth to know this – that it was definitely a form of self-medication.”
His addiction wasn’t the product of a harsh childhood, Burgoyne told the host, noting he came from an extremely loving family.
But when he came out as gay around the age of 15, he didn’t have a lot of role models. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to be working towards.”
Drinking became a real problem in his mid-twenties, when he started to consume alcohol alone. “I was less good at keeping it under wraps socially.”
Some friends stopped hanging out with Burgoyne. “They didn’t want to be around my antics.”
By the time Burgoyne hit 30, he was buying large bottles of high-proof beer in corner stores. “I was drinking about two of those a night. I am surprised that my liver still functions today.”
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He became reclusive. “One of the biggest things about addiction is shame.”
At the age of 32, someone offered him a glass pipe holding crystal methamphetamine.
After trying it three times over more than a month, “I knew that I had made a very grave error,” Burgoyne said, noting his addiction to crystal meth “completely supplanted” his addiction to alcohol.
Crystal meth put him on a downward spiral that made the problem impossible to ignore.
“That was a really lovely gift wrapped in really ugly paper,” Burgoyne said. “It forced me to confront what I had been denying.”
His family requested donations be made in Burgoyne’s name to the Canadian Assembly of Narcotics Anonymous. “In honour of Adam, hug your loved ones, take life one day at a time, bake bread, and buy the fancy cheese,” said his obituary.
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