The first indication was on November 27, and that's when at my local hospital we received the official notification from GE Healthcare that there would be a temporary disruption in the supply of isotopes to us. We continued on, adjusting accordingly, because we felt this was only going to be a short, couple-of-day issue, if you will. That's very compatible with what we've heard; the timelines were very fluid.
By Monday, December 3, my own department was getting very concerned, and we started to make phone calls to our national organizing body, the Canadian Society of Nuclear Medicine and the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine, to find out, gee, is this just a local event that I'm having problems with, or what's happening across Canada?
By December 5, we had enough information across Canada to state that we had a real problem here, because it was just not local. It was patchy, absolutely, so some areas were less affected than others. So we put out our first press release to state that there was a problem here and that it was having a significant negative impact on patient care, and that at that point we were beginning to ration access to health care in the nuclear medicine environment.
We had no direct communication with government, we had no direct communication with Health Canada or Natural Resources, and no direct communication with AECL or the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. So our only lines of communication were with us and to get the information out to the public.