A patient has told of her hospital hell that saw her spending almost a week on a trolley.
Catherine Drea lay for five days in a corridor in University Hospital Waterford after being admitted for a nasty stomach infection.
The Waterford woman arrived there last Sunday night so she could get a scan and be put on IV antibiotics.
Speaking to Sean O’Rourke on RTE Radio One, Catherine said: “I was parked on a corridor outside the room.
“I thought it was grand and that I’d get my antibiotics and my scan on Monday.
“I was anxious to get a diagnosis, but I had to wait until Tuesday afternoon to get it. I was still in the corridor and I felt sorry for the staff there – I was an extra, quite ill patient, on a ward of 35.
“I felt like the orphan child who shouldn’t really be there.
“There was two isolation rooms on either side of me.” The journalist told how the hospital is so short staffed she didn’t have a shower until the day before she left.
Catherine said; “I never had my bed changed, I never had a locker. I had absolutely nothing.
“I had no light. At six in the morning when they came to do my IV I’d hold my phone as a torch.
“The last day they they’d had a really hard night on the ward.
“A nurse came to give me the connector and she couldn’t do it, she tried but she couldn’t get it.
“I felt like I had to stand up and be my own advocate and ask for what I needed.
“I met some fantastic nurses and doctors who were obviously very skilled but the short-staffing was absolutely killer.”
