Ebony Teague was in pain from a suspected urinary tract infection but wasn’t sure if the emergency department at Central Maine Medical Center would admit her.

So, she made a telehealth appointment instead and had to pay $100 for a prescription because that provider, unlike CMMC, wouldn’t take MaineCare.

Kristine Adams started cutting her doses of insulin in half because she couldn’t reach her primary care doctor to get a refill.

Jhanyna Beall has been waiting two weeks for test results on her brain aneurysm, a serious condition that could require surgery and is potentially fatal.

As two Lewiston-area hospitals are working to return to normal after what leaders have described as recent cybersecurity incidents, patients in central and western Maine are still dealing with the fallout.

The first breach affected St. Mary’s Health System, whose owner, Massachusetts-based Covenant Health, disconnected the facility from all its data systems on May 26. Patients at St. Joseph Healthcare in Bangor, also owned by Covenant, were affected, too.

A week later, Central Maine Healthcare, which owns CMMC and smaller hospitals in Bridgton and Rumford, shut down its network servers and phone systems after identifying “unusual activity” within its computer systems.

Since then, nearly two dozen patients of both hospitals who responded to the Sun Journal reported a wide range of problems stemming from the outages.

Many have had appointments canceled, including operations and imaging necessary to test and diagnose serious illnesses like cancer and heart conditions. Prescriptions have gone unfilled. Providers initially had no way of accessing any patient information to remind them of appointments and were largely relying on patients to show up. Other patients have reported longer-than-normal wait times in the emergency department.

The two security breaches at the Lewiston hospitals are part of a growing trend in Maine and across the country.

Health care systems, which have sensitive personal information, have increasingly been targeted by hackers and held for ransom, although it’s not yet clear if that was the case here. Officials for both hospital systems have not answered questions about the nature of the cybersecurity incidents, and it’s not clear whether they are under investigation by any state or federal agency.

The incidents also come at a time when access to health care is increasingly challenging for many Mainers, who already face long wait times to get appointments, in part because of workforce challenges.

As of Friday, St. Mary’s said its services are fully operational but acknowledged some communication delays.

“During the recent downtime, imaging services continued to be reviewed in a timely manner,” Karen Sullivan, a spokesperson for Covenant, said in an email. “Results were provided to the ordering providers as they became available. In some cases, there may have been delays in communicating results directly to patients.”

Central Maine reported the same restoration, although phone lines at many of its medical offices remained down Friday.

WAITING FOR TEST RESULTS

Jhanyna Beall said she’s living with “super high anxiety” right now because she doesn’t know what’s happening in her brain.

The 43-year-old from Auburn has an aneurysm and periodically needs imaging to monitor and measure the size so that her doctors can determine whether she needs surgery. Aneurysms are abnormal, bulging areas within a blood vessel, and are potentially fatal.

Beall said she went for a magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) test at St. Mary’s about two weeks ago and still didn’t have the results, which she usually gets within a few days, by Friday afternoon.

She’s not blaming the hospital for the technical problems but added: “I need answers and I’m not getting them.

“Their systems are completely down. I can’t get a copy of my imaging. It’s dangerous,” she said.

She said she even asked St. Mary’s if she could get a hard copy of the imaging and hand deliver it to her doctor. But with the system offline, she can’t even do that, she said.

Beall who has three adult children and whose husband is a press operator at the Press Herald, said her head hurts when she laughs too much, and sometimes when she coughs. The uncertainty of not knowing what is happening with her aneurysm makes her nervous.

“I am basically depending on the system, but I don’t know what to do,” Beall said. “Should I be going about my normal, everyday routine the way I normally do? Can I still exercise? Should I be lifting weights? What should I be doing?”

Without information, she doesn’t know what to do. Another imaging test she needed — a scan of her kidneys to make sure that dye used in imaging is not adversely affecting them — also has been postponed.

Beall’s health problems are complex. Besides the aneurysm — which was discovered in late 2024 during neck scans after doctors found a benign tumor in her spine that needed to be removed — she has a connective tissue disorder.

The disorder, known as Loeys-Dietz Syndrome, was discovered by her doctors in 2023 and is the root cause of her aneurysm, and it has led to a host of other health problems. Her father died in 2010 at age 54 from the same condition.

As difficult as it’s been for her, Beall said she’s fortunate to have resources.

“I can’t even imagine what this is like if you are elderly or disabled. The repercussions are catastrophic,” she said.

RATIONING MEDICATION

Every year, Kristine Adams has to get approval from her primary doctor for an insulin prescription to treat her diabetes.

Before the refill can be processed, her insurance company and pharmacy need to communicate with her primary care physician. That’s all done electronically.

This year, her request was submitted June 2, the same day Central Maine Healthcare’s data system was taken offline.

The Auburn resident was running low, but was not overly concerned at first. These things happen, she remembered thinking to herself, and usually last only a few days.

When the weekend rolled around and she was not able to reach her doctor at all, she started to worry.

To make her insulin last longer, Adams started giving herself a half dose, administering it at every other meal instead of every meal.

“I’m kind of just rolling with the punches at this point and just praying to God that, you know, this system comes back up and running because this is not only affecting me,” she said.

Her sugar readings have already increased above her normal range, which increases the risk of developing diabetic ketoacidosis — a potentially life-threatening illness.

For nearly two weeks, Adams said, she has tried contacting her primary care office, but the phone line is down. She has mobility issues that make it difficult to leave her home and her husband works during the hours her doctor’s office is open, so it’s difficult for her to get there in person.

Adams contacted her insurance company to explain the situation, hoping they would help, but the company would not budge, she said. She only had enough insulin to last her until the weekend as of Wednesday. Without her insulin, she does not know what she will do.

“I’m holding out hope that I can get through this time because I don’t have anything else and I can’t pay out of pocket,” she said.

PAYING OUT OF POCKET

When Ebony Teague couldn’t get through to her Central Maine Healthcare primary care physician last week for a suspected UTI, she didn’t wait around long to find an alternative.

The pain was getting worse, and the hospital’s pharmacy was only taking paper prescriptions, which she did not have.

“Whenever I call the doctor’s office it just rings and rings, and there’s not even like, there’s no answering machine,” she said. “There’s no options.”

Teague, of Sabattus, has a medical condition that results in nerve pain in her bladder, which can sometimes feel like a UTI. That’s why she waited to make an appointment after she first started feeling symptoms.

“They kind of have the same symptoms, and I couldn’t really tell, and I wasn’t able to call, to go in to get like a urine sample,” she said.

Unsure if Central Maine’s Emergency Department would be able to see her in a timely manner, she made a telehealth appointment with an outside provider to get an antibiotic and pain medication. She was able to fill the order through Hannaford Pharmacy.

But the medications were not covered by her MaineCare insurance, so she had to pay about $100 out of pocket.

Teague said she worries some people who do not have the money to pay for medications might go without, putting their health at risk.

“A lot of people, especially in like the Lewiston-Auburn area, you know, they can’t afford things like that, especially in this economy,” she said. “So fortunately, I’m able to. But a lot of people can’t, or they don’t know about those resources available to them.”

She still hasn’t heard from the hospital but wondered why it wasn’t better prepared for such an incident and why it has not communicated more about what’s happening.

Central Maine has established a temporary website to relay information to patients and has put some of that on its social media pages, but many patients have shared their struggles with finding that information — often relying on responses from others who navigated a similar situation.

The hospital system has said little about what caused the issues, referring to it as a “system outage.” Teague and others worry that their personal information is at risk.

“I feel like they should have made more public announcements, like more officially, so that everyone could see kind of what’s going on and what they should be doing,” she said. “A lot of people just don’t know what they should be doing.”

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

Many other patients have shared similar stories about not getting prescriptions, waiting for test results and wondering if their appointments will be kept.

“It has affected every single local I talk to,” said one of the more than 20 people who responded to a request from the Sun Journal last week to talk about how the security breaches have affected them.

The health care system already has been difficult for some Mainers to navigate, according to patients who said they were frustrated with long wait times even before the breach.

Now, everything is even harder.

Those who have been in the hospitals have seen staff do their best to get by with old-school paper charts in lieu of electronic records. One patient said she appreciated the effort and professionalism of her providers, even though they had to ask the same questions about her medical history over and over again.

“Sympathetic but frustrated,” another patient said.

Some haven’t been able to get certain tests they need. Others can’t get their results, which has caused anxiety for those with potentially serious conditions. Getting prescriptions refilled has been a challenge for many.

“I worry about the elderly and disabled patients who don’t have a way to get down to the hospital pharmacy and are unaware and will go without lifesaving medications,” said one patient, who was told she could not renew her prescription over the phone.

The overwhelming sentiment, based on their stories, is frustration with how little information has been shared.

Why has this taken so long to fix? several patients asked.

And why haven’t we gotten more answers from the hospitals?