This month, I want to share three personal stories. They are not political talking points or statistics pulled from a government report. They are real experiences lived by people in my family over the past two decades in rural and northern Alberta.

Each story is different, but together they show the same troubling reality: healthcare services outside Alberta’s major cities have steadily declined, leaving families to carry burdens they should never have to face alone.

The first story is about my sister and her husband.

My brother-in-law spent the last years of his life battling prostate cancer. Eventually the cancer spread throughout his body. Like many people nearing the end of life, he wanted to remain at home rather than move into a facility. My sister promised she would care for him there.

What should have happened is that home care services would step in regularly to help with bathing, grooming, monitoring, and daily support. Instead, for the last six months of his life, my sister was almost completely on her own.

A nurse came roughly once a month to change a catheter. Beyond that, there was virtually no practical help at all. No assistance with bathing. No sponge baths. No regular support visits. Nothing that could realistically help a frail 79-year-old woman care for a dying husband.

As his condition worsened, he became too heavy and too weak for her to safely move alone. When he fell, she could not lift him. Their son eventually had to put his own life on hold and move in with his parents full time simply so his mother could cope physically and emotionally.

Families do not mind helping the people they love. That is not the issue. The issue is that healthcare systems are supposed to support families in moments like these, not disappear from them entirely.

My brother-in-law died on April 2 of this year. My sister did everything she could for him, but she should never have had to shoulder that responsibility almost entirely alone.

The second story goes back to 2004 and involves my father-in-law.

He required dialysis treatment, but there was no dialysis service available in High Prairie at the time. That meant he and my mother-in-law had no choice but to leave their home community and relocate closer to treatment.

Imagine what that means for an elderly couple. They had to sell their house and uproot their lives because essential medical care was unavailable where they lived.

Before they could even find an apartment, they stayed with their daughter for three months. During that time, dialysis appointments completely dominated family life. Three times a week, my sister-in-law had to leave work, drive her parents to treatments and appointments, and then bring them home again. She used holidays and missed work simply trying to keep her parents cared for.

The stress on the family was enormous. It affected finances, employment, emotional health, and daily life. None of it was caused by a rare medical condition or an extraordinary emergency. It happened because rural Albertans could not access a service as essential as dialysis close to home.

People living in northern Alberta deserve the same chance to remain in their communities as people living in Edmonton or Calgary. Yet many families are still forced into impossible choices between healthcare and the lives they built over decades.

The third story is my own, though I include it only because it reflects how long these problems have existed.

About 15 years ago, I badly injured my shoulder. At the time, I was told I would likely need to travel to Edmonton for treatment because services closer to home simply were not available.

Compared to what my sister and father-in-law experienced, my situation was minor. I recovered. But what stayed with me was the realization that even then, rural healthcare systems were already stretched thin.

Back then, many people believed things would improve with time. More doctors would come north. More services would become available locally. Wait times would improve. Rural Albertans would finally receive the level of healthcare they deserved.

Instead, many of us have watched the opposite happen.

Services have become harder to access. Families travel farther. Home care support is increasingly limited. Seniors remain on waiting lists while family members struggle to fill the gaps. Communities lose doctors and specialized care. People in northern and rural Alberta are too often left feeling forgotten.

These stories are not meant to criticize the nurses, doctors, or healthcare workers themselves. Most are doing everything they can under difficult circumstances. The problem is a system that increasingly asks families to absorb responsibilities that should not rest entirely on their shoulders.

Healthcare should not depend on your postal code.

A frail elderly woman should not be left alone to care for a dying husband with almost no home support. An elderly couple should not have to leave their community because dialysis is unavailable nearby. Families should not have to reorganize their entire lives just to access basic medical care.

For years, rural Albertans have been told to be patient. We have been told improvements are coming. Yet many families are still waiting while services continue to shrink around them.

These are not isolated stories. Across rural and northern Alberta, countless families are carrying similar burdens quietly and privately every day.

They deserve better.