It should have been a routine pharmacy pickup.
Instead, Marissa Dawson says it turned into a months-long ordeal that ended in the emergency room — and exposed gaps in the system meant to keep patients safe.
The 35-year-old Moncton, N.B., mother of two was prescribed a new allergy medication in October 2024 to manage the itching from chronic eczema. She was supposed to receive hydroxyzine, an antihistamine. But what she picked up from a Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacy was hydralazine, which is used to lower blood pressure.
Instead of her allergies improving, she noticed she was often flushed, felt dizzy and struggled to breathe.
“I felt completely lethargic, and I was very faint,” she said.
By April, she says her symptoms continued to worsen, until her mother had to drive her to the emergency room.
That’s where an emergency nurse checked her medication, and everything became clear: She had unknowingly been taking the wrong medication for months.
“I was just kind of confused,” she said. “And I started just thinking, ‘What if this happened to my kid, or any child?’ I was scared.”
- Got a story you want investigated? Contact Erica and the Go Public team at gopublic@cbc.ca.
Dawson is one of tens of thousands of Canadians who experience medication mix-ups. There are a variety of protections in place meant to catch errors like these, in what’s known as the “Swiss cheese model” of medication safety,
This story was brought to Nouzie by RSS. The original post can be found on https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/pharmacists-prescriptions-medication-errors-near-miss-health-canada-9.7156873?cmp=rss
