When Penticton resident Betty Lou Thomas woke up in her local hospital’s intensive care unit, she had no memory of what had happened. The last thing she remembered was sitting in a waiting room at her gym on a fall November day. She had suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed without warning. Twenty-four hours later, she was transferred to the cardiac care unit at Kelowna General Hospital (KGH).

As Herb Armishaw sat in a waiting room at the hospital in Williams Lake one day last fall, he began chatting with others who had joined him there.

Herb is from Forest Grove, a community of about 300 people near 100 Mile House. He learned that others came from places such as Clinton and Hathaway, other nearby communities in the Cariboo region. No matter where they came from, they all had one thing in common: they were waiting for cataract surgery on the first day it was offered at Cariboo Memorial Hospital (CMH).