My tumour is right here.
[Reporter: Christine Birak] 23-year-old Melodie Cyr was told her tumour might be cancerous.
She needs a biopsy to find out.
But the surgery's been cancelled twice.
The biopsy never happened and I cried a lot.
And I almost yelled at the surgeon.
[Reporter] In Ontario alone close to 150,000 people are waiting for surgeries
put on hold by this pandemic.
Now some doctors say they've got a plan to get those patients into operating rooms.
It's been all hands on deck.
So far and what we're saying is we can't
lose focus here.
[Reporter] Computer modelling shows it will take more than a year and a half
to clear Ontario's backlog in surgeries.
To do that staff and surgeons must treat over 700 patients a week.
And they'll need 265 open beds.
I think a lot of support is going to be
required hold off there for a sec.
[Reporter] Surgeon Jory Simpson says he's willing to work overtime.
The model recommends operating rooms be set up ahead of time
allowing doctors to move quickly from
one patient to the next.
This could allow for an additional three to five patients
to be operated on that day by that surgeon.
But in reality we haven't received more resources in order to address this backlog in surgery.
[Reporter] Any plan would require added health care funding.
And hospitals could still see a surge in COVID-19 patients.
And it's quite likely we will then we're going to have backlogs
that build on backlogs in the world of surgery.
B.C. had about 30,000 patients step aside during this pandemic.
Half have now had their surgeries.
The rest were added to a pre-existing wait list of 93,000 people.
Manitoba recently spent two and a half million dollars.
Its plan is to send waiting patients to public and private clinics for care.
You can go from a stage one to stage four.
Cyrs just wants to know if she has cancer or not
while there are still hospital beds available.
Christine Birak, CBC News, Toronto.
