TORONTO -- Oshawa resident Jane McFarlane-Watts, 65, had been set to receive open-heart surgery Tuesday morning in Toronto—until she was told the life-saving procedure had to be put on hold due to capacity issues within the intensive care unit.

McFarlane-Watts has been living with a 5.5 centimetre aortic aneurysm and had been relieved to have been given a surgery date at Toronto General Hospital.

“It’s the emotional mess that you have to go through to get yourself prepared for that,” she told CTV News Toronto Tuesday.

But when she attended the hospital early Tuesday morning she was informed the procedure needed to be rescheduled. She says she was told that COVID-19 cases were straining the intensive care unit where she would need to recover following the operation.

According to Critical Care Services Ontario, Toronto General Hospital has 111 intensive care unit beds, 92 of which were occupied as of Friday morning; 26 of them were filled with COVID-19 patients.

“Toronto and north of Toronto, east of Toronto, west of Toronto are underwater,” Dr. Michael Warner, medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital said Tuesday. “I don’t know if we really want to be pushing the critical care system to the breaking point.”

Warner reported that his hospital had been asked to make specific plans to accommodate 115 per cent of its critical care capacity as part of a surge planning initiative.

“Worst case scenario, Ontario is facing a mass-casualty situation that will test our critical care system like it never has been done before,” Anthony Dale, president of the Ontario Hospital Association told CTV News Toronto Tuesday.

Dale said more surgeries would likely need to be postponed as COVID-19 cases climbed and demanded critical care resources.

“The only way to absorb that kind of very large surge of patients needing critical care is to reassign staff, physicians and registered nurses in particular, to care for them,” Dale said.

McFarlane-Watts, meanwhile, is awaiting word on when her surgery might be rescheduled.

“If I were to die tomorrow it wouldn’t be recorded as a COVID death, but it’s directly related to COVID because I would have had life-saving surgery this morning,” she said.