A damning truth is that often the last place a sick person wants to go in Ireland is a hospital

Healthcare lottery leaves our infirm in terror and medics at breaking point

- BY ROY CURTIS

IT plays on a shameful loop, a slaughterer of hope rupturing already bruised and brittle spirits, this bottomless, eternal Irish sorrow that is the hospital overcrowding crisis.

October of each year, the evenings and national mood simultaneously darkening, reintroduces the gross annual abasement, the grim soundtrack of the season for the many besieged by grievous illness. Tis the season to be on a trolley.

Only those with an empty lot where the heart ordinarily resides could fail to be moved, first to distress and shortly after to incandescent fury, by the sight of elderly, wizened, suffering grandparents compelled to fight for their life in a draughty corridor.

At the most difficult moment of their existence, they are afforded all the dignity of sheep in a slaughterhouse holding pen." As bloodsports go, it doesn't get any more grisly than being compelled to look on helplessly as a loved one wheezes and frets, wondering, even as they grasp desperately to the last of their strength, if this affront to decency is to be their deathbed.

I will always remember my own mother, terminally ill with cancer and in severe pain, begging those around her not to call an ambulance one night even as the poor woman vomited something that resembled radioactive waste.

She was more terrified of the stories she had heard about emergency departments than she was of death.

This week yielded a report on how to confront the lethal chaos that is emergency department patients strewn like windblown confetti into every available nook and cranny of University Hospital Limerick.

Like so many similar well-meaning reports, it might have been titled 'How to put a sticking plaster on a mortal wound'.

PANDEMONIUM

Our hospital emergency departments - no matter how dedicated and devoted the frequently heroic medical and support staff- are a study in tumult and pandemonium and the fighting against impossible odds.