‘19 hours waiting with no dignity’
AS THE paramedics were wheeling me into the A&E in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, on a trolley I heard one of them go, ‘Oh Jesus.’ It was so busy, the triage nurse told them to leave me in the waiting room, sitting on a chair. I was told there was an eight-hour wait. It was catastrophic. I had been off work because I had the vomiting bug but on Tuesday it got worse. And, because I have some other underlying conditions, when I phoned the out-of-hours GP service the nurse said I should go to Our Lady of Lourdes.
I wasn’t worried at first. I knew I was very sick but I’m 43. I’m healthy enough, usually, and I’ve been in A&E before.
My father was ill for a long time and we were in A&E in Dublin and Sligo, so I knew it would be busy.
I was coughing blood and I felt very weak and lethargic. An ambulance took me into the hospital at about 6pm.
There were about 50 people in the A&E when I arrived. I was put on a seat that I was lucky to get – it was the last one there.
At 2am I was still on that chair. There was no water left in the dispenser. I asked a cleaner, a lovely man, if he could fill it, but he said all the water canisters were empty.
There was a 68-year-old man sitting near me. He said he was in with kidney stones so he should have been drinking lots and lots of water. There was nowhere to get a cup of tea. The receptionist said the machine for tea and coffee was broken.
There was a sweets machine, with soft drinks, but you don’t want that when you’re sick.
At 3am I got a trolley. I was elated. It felt like you were going up in the world, and it was lovely to stretch out. There were three trolleys on my corridor, four on another and two more that I could see.
But within about 30 minutes I was woken up and was told the trolley was needed by someone else. I was sent back out to the waiting room, to sit on a chair.
I was on my own. I’d told my partner Seán not to come down. There was no point in him standing around and I didn’t want him to catch anything.
Another man I saw that night was so tired that he took off his coat and spread it on the floor, before lying down on the ground. He was 72.
There was a lot of talk in the media about the flu being the reason why it was so busy, but I didn’t really hear people saying that’s why they were in. They were talking about broken bones, anaemia, chest infections and kidney stones.
I think one of the nurses was coming down with the flu. A woman was shouting at her about something, and said the nurse should go home anyway. The nurse just smiled at her, and said: ‘It’s called dedication love, we’re all here.’
Someone came round to that man on the floor after a while and put him on a trolley. At about 5am he was sent by ambulance to Dublin.
I just sat there. You can’t sleep like that. There were other people there all night like me, mostly in their 50s and 60s.
We could see the triage nurse was overwhelmed and there was still new patients arriving.
The receptionist asked her to come to a patient in the waiting area who’d ‘taken a turn’ but she was so busy she couldn’t go.
The doctors looked wrecked too, I felt so sorry for them. It’s not their fault. Some of the doctors were, I think, from Pakistan, and because they were tired, and the patients were tired there were problems with communication.
When I was eventually seen in the morning, they said I had a bad chest infection but nothing worse than that, even though I’d been coughing blood. I was sent home at 1.30pm – after more than 19 hours.
I wouldn’t go back, even if my GP sent me. You wouldn’t want to be dying in a hospital when it’s like that – no trolley, no dignity and nowhere to go.
‘I wouldn’t go back in, even if my GP sent me’