A man asked his mum if he'd died and gone to hell after waiting 13 hours for treatment at an A&E overloaded with ill patients.
Miles Jeffrey was driven to Torbay Hospital by his mum Liz after the 24-year-old started suffering with an emergency bowel condition.
They'd decided to hop in the car having been told an ambulance would take six hours to arrive, Devon Live reported.
At one point, sobbing and in pain, Liz said her son asked her: "Mum have I died and gone to hell?"
Mother and son said they witnessed the already overcrowded and cramped waiting room getting more and more full as they waited for help for 12 hours on Wednesday this week - watching as up to 16 ambulances queued outside.
The pair said they have nothing but praise for the five staff - two health care assistants, one nurse and two doctors - who were there - and also for the high quality of care at Torbay Hospital their son Miles has had for multiple complex health conditions throughout his life.
But Alan, Miles' dad, is angry that the A&E was left so understaffed.
"Why are there less than half the staff running a busy A&E department than I have running my garage?" he asked.
He likened the health department to a war zone.
"Conditions were only separated from the Lebanon by the absence of broken glass and rubble," he said.
In the end the couple decided that their son was too ill to stay all night, sitting on a hard plastic chair in A&E and waiting for a doctor on his morning rounds to see them.
There were no beds and no trolleys for him to lie on.
"We were told that Miles was next in line for a bed - I got the distinct impression that he would only get one if somebody died," Mrs Jeffery said.
She had to sign disclaimer forms before being allowed to drive her son home.
"I knew there was no point asking for an ambulance as I could see they were all still queueing outside," she said.
Mrs Jeffery cried as she recalled a young mum who came in reporting a miscarriage.
Another woman collapsed unconscious at their feet, while an elderly man with dementia sat bleeding beside them.
A woman with a "hideously deformed" broken leg, with sweat on her face from the pain, had to keep asking people not to kick her leg as they walked past.
At one point police brought in a man in a spit hood.
A male security guard was the only person free to take a woman in a wheelchair to the toilet.
Another woman drunk or on drugs wet herself as she slept.
"It was like watching an episode of a horror movie - every time someone comes in you would hear an even worse story. There's no privacy," Mrs Jeffrery said.
"I've never been through anything like it in my whole life. We want to stress that Miles has had nothing but superb treatment his whole life at that hospital.
"And the people working on Wednesday were kind and patient - the young health care assistants looked only about 18 or 19 to me.
"One looked in danger of collapsing herself because she was the one everyone was firing questions at.
"The doctor we saw was running down the corridors. He was so kind. He even took blood samples himself because there was such a long wait."
Her husband decided to put pen to paper to tell people about the broken system.
"Liz was telling me everything live via Messenger," he said.
"It was lucky I wasn't there because I would have gone apoplectic.
"I was listening to her and thinking 'Where's the managers?' It's ludicrous that they only have five people running that department.
"The system is broken. It was just lucky that my son didn't have internal bleeding. Miles shouldn't have been going through A&E - it's just a convenient catch-all.
"People were scared and in pain and nobody was coming up to ask them if they needed the toilet, a drink - there was no simple humanity.
"I do not believe that 'under funding' is the direct cause of this. I believe that muddled thinking, poor management and a completely flawed attitude to primary care is at fault.
"Along with the care system, it has been completely forgotten that how people feel really matters.
"The practice of funnelling everybody through the A&E bottleneck should cease. There must be a viable method of dispersal to the correct sort of care that avoids everybody being lumped together in a humiliating lottery for attention. Remember, it should be an A&E department, not the war zone it has become."
A spokesperson for Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust apologised.
“Like most trusts, we have been under significant pressure during recent months with more people needing emergency treatment and an increase in prevalence of Covid-19 in our communities, our hospitals and our staff," they said.
"This has had an impact across our whole healthcare system with fewer beds available in our hospitals and in care homes and fewer care staff to support people at home.
"This in turn makes it difficult to discharge people from hospital into the community or back home, and means that sometimes patients being admitted to hospital from our Emergency Department (ED) will experience long waits before we can find a ward bed for them.
“We are seeing five per cent more people attending our Emergency Department than at the same time last year and sadly, many of those attending do face long waits for treatment if their condition is not an immediate life-threatening emergency.
“Every person waiting for care is important to us, and our dedicated staff will always prioritise the sickest patients first.
"Sadly, in the current environment, this means difficult decisions often have to be made and some people experience a longer wait and a poorer overall experience than we would like.”
"Our Emergency Department team make sure that patients waiting are assessed and care is escalated and prioritised where there are clinical concerns about individual patients."
