For more than 24 hours, Guy Pollock lay in a hospital bed in the hallway of Saskatoon's Royal University Hospital.

The 71-year-old estimates more than 2,000 people walked past him as he was treated for pneumonia.

Pollock lives with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, and is immunocompromised. In an interview on Thursday, he described his experience as traumatizing.

"I have been avoiding everybody for the last couple of years because of my lungs, and a cold would kill me," he said.

"Being stuck in that hallway is just not a place I wanted to be, almost to the point of panic."

Pollock, who describes himself as "an old farmer," lives in Watrous, Sask., a town about 90 kilometres southeast of Saskatoon.

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