As some of you may remember, there was a heartbreaking news story about a sick Canadian patient trapped in our inefficient health care system with a small window of time and few remaining options. It received national and international coverage just before the Christmas holidays. (I wrote about it for the UK’s Daily Telegraph on Dec. 17, 2025.) No-one was certain how things would ultimately turn out.
Here’s some good news. This traumatic health care experience may actually end up with a happy ending due to the unexpected involvement of a U.S. political commentator with a good heart.
This is the tale of Jolene Van Alstine, who lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. She was diagnosed with a rare form of parathyroid disease over eight years ago. Van Alstine has reportedly dealt with severe abdominal pain, extreme bone pain and fractures. Her condition can also lead to nausea and vomiting, overheating, anxiety and depression.
“It has been horrific,” Van Alstine told the media last November. “Every day I get up and I’m sick to my stomach and I throw up and I throw up. And then it takes me hours to cool off. I overheat. We have to turn the temperature down to 14 degrees when I get up in the morning in the house. So I’m so sick.” She went on to say, “I don’t leave the house except to go to medical appointments, blood work, or go to the hospital. My friends have stopped visiting me. I’m isolated. I’ve been alone, laying on the couch for eight years. Sick and curled up in a ball, wishing for the day to end. I go to bed at 6 o’clock at night because I can’t stand to be awake anymore.”
It didn’t have to be that way.
Van Alstine’s condition is treatable. Alas, there were no doctors in Saskatchewan who could perform this complex type of surgery. Couldn’t her case have been moved on to a qualified surgeon in a different province? Yes, but she needed to get a referral from an endocrinologist – and none of them were apparently taking new patients. She reportedly tried to get admitted into Tampa’s Norman Parathyroid Clinic, but told a user on X, “They refused to see me with a referral from an endocrinologist which I’m unable to get because there are no endocrinologists accepting new patients and my last one refused to see me after me surgery and said I was no longer his patient and he didn’t care.”
Her condition worsened with each passing day. Most of her available options had dried up. She even went as far as to be approved for MAID, or medical assistance in dying, due to the pain and suffering she had endured. Her husband, Miles Sundeen, told Global News that “she doesn’t want to die” and has “expressed that” to him, but he understands her position “after watching her suffer for this length of time.” Even that terrible fate hit a roadblock. “Ironically that option,” according to Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington, “which looked like it could be utilized as early as Jan. 7, 2026, has now stalled as a result of Saskatchewan MAID officials telling Jolene that her earlier approval has been pulled because of a bureaucratic error in which just one doctor signed off on it.” (Two independent medical practitioners are required for mandatory sign-off in Canada.)
Van Alstine and Sundeen have largely focused on her condition rather than critiquing the Canadian health care system during interviews. Nevertheless, they’re frustrated with this situation and inaction from the provincial and federal governments. “It makes me feel very sad that we have to go to the media, get the support from the NDP to have people in this province support the health system,” he told John Cairns of SaskToday, and “it definitely needs to be improved so there’s more health (care) for people who have really dire health.”
Then, an unforeseen ray of hope appeared.
Glenn Beck, the conservative talk radio and TV host, caught wind of Van Alstine’s situation. He was mortified and selflessly offered to pay for her surgery. “If there is any surgeon in America who can do this, I’ll pay for this patient to come down here for treatment,” he wrote on X on Dec. 9, 2025. “THIS is the reality of ‘compassionate’ progressive healthcare. Canada must END this insanity and Americans can NEVER let it spread here.” Beck noted on additional posts that “we have surgeons who emailed us standing by to help her,” he had been “in contact” with the couple, and although Van Alstine “does not have a passport to gain legal entry into the U.S….my team has been in touch with President Trump’s State Department.”
The couple were touched by Beck’s kindness. “I greatly appreciate it,” Van Alstine said to Warmington. “It’s an amazing offer and I can’t believe someone would do that.” Sundeen, who was recently interviewed by Beck, told him, “I just wanted to say thank you so much. Apparently you’re a very popular guy. You’ve opened up a lot of doors.” He had Beck close to tears on the radio when he discussed his wife’s decision to be approved for MAID, saying, “I can’t blame her. It will break my heart, but…to be honest with you, Glenn, she’s a strong girl. If it was me, I think I would have had a gun to my head long ago.”
Things have started to improve for Van Alstine. She still has pain and discomfort, but didn’t use MAID and is now fighting to regain her health. “I have been taking high doses of calcium and vitamin D. This was recommended by the specialist from Toronto and the surgeon in Florida agreed that this should be tried first,” she told Warmington in a follow-up Jan. 7 interview. “If it brings my parathyroid levels down to low normal, then I don’t need another surgery, I need an endocrinologist who deals with patients who need monitoring of their calcium, vitamin D and magnesium levels and can adjust them as needed…if it does not bring my levels down then there is still another gland inside me somewhere that is overactive.”
Van Alstine mentioned that “I never wanted to go through with MAID but I lost hope. I’m Roman Catholic. Suicide is a sin, but I just couldn’t stand the pain and nausea and vomiting and overheating 24/7.” Hence, she’s “just praying that I get treatment, whether it be medication or surgery. I just want to feel well again.”
She’s also stayed in touch with Beck, her guardian angel, on the phone. As longtime Australian journalist Tony Davenport pointed out in a Jan. 24 piece for Vision Christian Media, “If it wasn’t for the intervention of popular American conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck, life might have already been over for Canadian Jolene Van Alstine. In fact, without the spotlight he shone on her situation, she could be just another statistic on Canada’s soaring assisted suicide rate.”
Fortunately, this terrible ending never came to pass. While the chapters of Van Alstine’s mortifying health care story are still being written, a positive and upbeat conclusion has become a distinct possibility. That’s the type of news most of us like to hear.
Michael Taube, a longtime newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
