LEWISTON — Patients at Lewiston’s two biggest health care systems struggle with canceled appointments and filling prescriptions amid a “cyber incident” simultaneously plaguing Central Maine Healthcare and St. Mary’s Health System’s information system, causing a significant outage with records and communications.

Paula Morse said she has significant concerns that the outage could delay an important heart surgery for her husband in early July at Central Maine Medical Center. He needs a valve replacement but first doctors need to perform a procedure to make sure there is no blockage in his veins and arteries, which is delayed because of the system outage.

The Lewiston resident is concerned that if her husband does have a significant blockage it could result in a major medical emergency before the system can be restored and doctors can perform that procedure — possibly even putting off his heart valve procedure, she said.

It is not practical to seek services from another specialist at another hospital as wait times are long for new patients and a new doctor would likely need to do their own work-ups on her husband — still requiring them to wait for services and get a paper referral from their doctor, she said.

“There’s so much to go through to find another doctor,” she said. “It would mean getting a referral from our doctor, waiting for somebody to call, trying to book an appointment. Some doctors are booking six to eight months out.”

Doctors have assured her that it is unlikely he will have a significant medical emergency in the near future but it is cold comfort when it comes to a serious health condition, she said.

Central Maine Health Care and St. Mary’s Health System are encouraging patients not to cancel appointments.

Central Maine is encouraging patients to call 911 if there is an emergency because its Emergency Department is still open, according to Central Maine Medical Center’s Facebook post Friday.

Most of the hospital system’s clinics and practices are open and they encourage people to visit during regular business hours if people have trouble reaching them, according to the Facebook post. It is also asking patients to bring lab orders or appointment letters with them for faster service.

Though the MyHealthlink patient portal system is functional, staff are not receiving messages sent through the system, according to the Facebook post. Limited phone access is available at 207-795-0111.

“While we know our system outage has been challenging, please know that your doctors, nurses and care team at Central Maine Medical Center have been thinking of you and hope you are well,” according to the Facebook post.

St. Mary’s is seeing all scheduled patients, spokesperson Karen Sullivan said Friday. All of its services are open and operating, including same-day appointments in provider practices, which can be scheduled by patients through their provider’s office. It is triaging patient medication refill requests to ensure they are filled in a timely manner.

Lewiston resident Beth Gomberg sees a doctor in southern Maine for fluoroquinolone-associated disability, when someone has a bad reaction to a type of antibiotic, but she gets medications to treat the conditions from Central Maine Healthcare’s pharmacy.

After taking the antibiotic two years ago, she relies on an electric wheelchair because her tendons are weak, she feels chronic pain and she has trouble with stamina that requires her to be on various pain management prescriptions, she said.

It is important for her to have access to her medications as she continues to figure out how to live with the condition, she said. She has not been able to refill prescriptions at Central Maine this week and she has less than a week before she runs out of her most important medication.

She still has not heard from anyone directly about the situation at the pharmacy and the phone lines she usually uses to call the pharmacy are down, which has made it difficult for her to know what to do, she said. She has received some advice from others on social media who have learned how to work around the current situation.

“It just has been kind of a frustrating experience to just be winging it and not have any information,” she said. “I think that’s really the hardest part is … no one has a way to inform people of what’s going on, really – or so it seems.”

To refill her medication, she thinks she will have to get a paper prescription from her doctor and take it to the pharmacy, but that requires an extra trip to southern Maine, she said.

She is not the only one trying to manage her care with limited resources, and for some people there is a small window in which they feel their care needs to be addressed.

West Paris resident Farralee Ouelette was supposed to have an ultrasound on an area she had biopsied before she could have another biopsy for lumps in her breast, she said. That appointment through Central Maine Medical Center, originally scheduled for Tuesday, had to be canceled because of the system outage.

As a survivor of a different type of cancer and someone with a family history of breast cancer, she is anxious to get answers and — if necessary — start treatment, she said.

She does not know when that appointment will be rescheduled and she is concerned that when the system is up and functional again her appointment could be pushed out further because the hospital system might have an influx of canceled appointments to reschedule.

Central Maine Healthcare did not respond to requests for comment.

St. Mary’s continues to ask patients to keep appointments because there are no major delays in service, Sullivan said. It is still unclear when service will be restored but the organization has made significant progress toward restoration.

“We have solid reentry plans in place to enter downtime data into the electronic medical record and do not anticipate any delays in service when we are fully back online,” she said.

Morse thinks the incident highlights the need for Central Maine to have a contingency plan for incidents like this when electronic medical records become inaccessible.

“They always say computers are great until they break. People need to realize this could happen at anytime and somehow someway, there has to be backups put in place,” she said.