The pain of waiting

My mum-in-law was admitted to Mater Dei Hospital's ITU Department last Saturday suffering from chest pains, an indication of heart attack.

I am not in the position to imply what her difficulty might have been but neither was the nurse/doctor who had examined her more than eight hours earlier. She was hurting badly and all we could do was wait in the tense ITU waiting room with some other complaining, injured people.

We saw a waiting patient fainting to the floor; a very little boy with a broken leg crying to go home because he got fed up waiting, and so on! I thought we had a state-of-the-art hospital but clearly, if we can leave all this suffering going on in the ITU, then God help us all.