Prashant Sreekumar was a man who lived for his family. A 44-year-old accountant with a sharp mind and a kind heart, he spent his days balancing books and his evenings playing with his three young children in Edmonton. But on Monday, December 22, the life he built came to a sudden, heartbreaking end in a place where he was supposed to be safe: a hospital waiting room.
The nightmare began while Prashant was at work. He started feeling a crushing sensation in his chest and knew something was wrong. A client, seeing his distress, rushed him to Grey Nuns Community Hospital in southeast Edmonton. When he arrived at triage, Prashant didn’t downplay his agony. He told the medical staff that on a scale of one to ten, his pain was a “15.” He was terrified he was having a heart attack.
Medical staff performed an electrocardiogram (ECG) shortly after he checked in, but the results didn’t trigger any alarms for the team. According to his family, they told him nothing significant was detected. They handed him a Tylenol for the pain and told him to take a seat. For the next eight hours, that plastic chair in the waiting room became the only thing supporting a man whose body was slowly failing him.
As the hours ticked by, Prashant’s father, Kumar Sreekumar, sat by his side, watching his son’s condition crumble. Nurses would occasionally check his blood pressure, which Kumar says was climbing higher and higher, eventually hitting a terrifying 210. Prashant began to suffer from blurred vision and dry heaving, yet he remained in the lobby, just another face in a crowded room of people waiting for help that wasn’t coming fast enough.
It wasn’t until after midnight—more than eight hours after he first walked through the doors—that Prashant was finally called into the treatment area. He stood up and walked to a bed, but he only made it a few seconds. He clutched his chest, looked at his father, and collapsed. Medical teams rushed to revive him, but the man who had been pleading for help all night never woke up. He was pronounced dead of an apparent cardiac arrest.
The loss has left a massive hole in the Edmonton community. Prashant leaves behind a wife and three children, ages 3, 10, and 14, who are now facing their first Christmas without a father. Friends describe him as a pillar of the local Indian-origin community and a dedicated professional whose life revolved around providing for his kids. Now, his family is left demanding answers about why a man with clear symptoms of heart failure was left to wait for nearly a full workday.
Covenant Health, which runs the hospital, has expressed its deepest sympathies but says it cannot discuss the specifics of Prashant’s care due to privacy laws. They have turned the case over to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for a full investigation. Meanwhile, the tragedy has sparked a wave of anger across Alberta, where residents are tired of hearing about overflowing emergency rooms and hours-long waits that have become a deadly new normal.
