Our 15 hours of hospital hell after my mother's stroke. We saw patients urinating in the corridor, nurses being slapped and ambulances queuing for hours... the NHS is truly broken: BRYONY GORDON
I had called my mother for a quick catch-up when it became clear that there was a serious problem.
It was about 10.30am, an average Wednesday two and a bit weeks ago, when my usually sparky, chatty, bright and switched-on mum answered the phone in a way that suggested something was terribly wrong.
With a befuddled voice, she told me she wasn’t feeling well. She was confused and couldn’t work out how to open the back door to let the dog out. ‘I’m supposed to be at work,’ she told me, ‘they keep calling. But I can’t understand how to do anything.’
Because I’m paranoid, and because her mother – my grandmother – had died of one 20 years ago, I immediately suspected she was having a stroke.
I remembered the famous F.A.S.T test to recognise the signs – F for facial drooping, A for arm weakness, S for speech problems, T for time being of the essence if you recognise any of these symptoms.
My mum couldn’t tell me about her face, or her arms, but her speech was confused in a way I hadn’t encountered in all my 45 years on the planet, so I immediately told her to stay where she was while I called 999.
The emergency operator told me the call was marked as high priority and that an ambulance would arrive as a matter of urgency. I would soon discover that my definition of terms such as ‘urgency’ and ‘high priority’ were very different to the definitions used by the NHS in 2025.
I live in south London, 40 miles away from my mother’s home just outside Henley-on-Thames, a journey that takes about an hour and a half by car. My husband and I didn’t arrive before the ambulance, but it wasn’t long after – it had taken an hour and 28 minutes after my 999 call for help to arrive.
My usually glamorous mother – she never leaves the house without make-up – was washed out and grey, a faraway look in her eyes. I took a deep breath, and affected the breezy tones of someone calm (or in denial).
If she wasn’t having a stroke, she was certainly experiencing some sort of major neurological event – she didn’t know what year it was, couldn’t name the prime minister (‘he’s an earnest looking fellow with no neck,’ was how she described Keir Starmer), and complained that she felt ‘stoned’ (she’s never so much as smoked a cigarette).
The paramedics clearly thought she was a woman with dementia who’d had a funny turn.
Almost three weeks ago, Bryony Gordon's usually sparky and chatty mother answered the phone – and Bryony immediately suspected she was having a stroke
'All in all, it had indeed taken almost 15 hours between me reporting the symptoms of a stroke in my mother, to her receiving the correct care for it,' writes Bryony Gordon
I explained to them that until that morning, my 69-year-old mother was doing fiendish Sudokus, extra hard Codewords and living independently with a full-time job.
In the ambulance on the way to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, a call went out across the radios.
The lovely paramedic sitting with us in the back explained that someone had stopped breathing but there wasn’t an ambulance available to send to them. Emergency services were requesting that anyone dealing with non-urgent cases drop what they were doing and go immediately to the patient.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ she explained sadly, when I asked her what would happen to the poor person in question.
It wasn’t as if they could dump us on the side of the A4155, and anyway, the more time I spent in the back of the ambulance with my mum, the more I knew something was very, very wrong. Like all the nurses and doctors we encountered that day, the paramedics were incredible, professional... and utterly powerless in the face of a health service crumbling under the weight of problems so endless I would use up my word count were I to list them all here.
I could see the resigned look on their faces as we pulled up in the hospital car park, only to be told we’d have to wait there until there was space inside A&E.
How did they do this job every day, working flat out, all while knowing it could never be enough?
I tried to comfort myself with the idea that a bed would have been found if something was seriously wrong. And by all accounts, we were lucky, only having to wait half an hour before space became available in A&E… by space, what I mean is a chair in a corridor of cubicles crammed with patients on IV drips. Was I surprised when I read the shocking Age UK report published last week, about the ‘crisis’ of ‘corridor care’ in our country’s A&E departments? Not one bit.
The study listed incidents such as an elderly man being left in his own excrement in a chair for 20 hours, while a 79-year-old woman told the charity her trip to A&E had ‘reminded me of war films, with queues of stretchers and people suffering’.
A war or disaster movie was exactly how I would have described the scene at the Royal Berkshire, where security guards in stab-proof vests roamed the corridors. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had to use an A&E, and while I usually roll my eyes at reports on the perilous state of our health service – surely we don’t know how lucky we are compared to, say, the US? – I have to say that what I witnessed that Wednesday truly shocked me.
To use a crude analogy: this felt like a health system that needed to be put on life support.
In the corridor, nurses took my mother’s blood pressure and temperature. They told us a doctor would see her as soon as possible. Just a few metres away, a patient who clearly needed to be in psychiatric care squatted on the floor and urinated. When nurses tried to stop her, she slapped one of them.
Security came, the nurse walked off shaking her head and laughing to herself, presumably because otherwise she might cry.
Outside in the waiting room, it was standing room only. Over the public address system, those accompanying patients were asked to give up their seats for people that needed them more.
After four hours, a doctor finally came and told my mother she needed a CT scan. By now we’d been moved to a chair within a cubicle, instead of one in a corridor – hooray! – so my mum could at least sit behind the relative privacy of a hospital curtain. I didn’t dare ask if she could be moved to something as luxurious as a bed.
My mum’s confusion became something of a blessing as we waited, and waited, and waited.
After five hours in A&E, she had her CT scan. After six hours, the doctor came to tell us she had indeed had a stroke, in her thalamus, the part of the brain that processes sensory and motor information.
She would be transferred to the acute stroke unit as soon as a bed became available.
When might that be? It was like asking for the length of a piece of string. ‘We have a large queue of ambulances outside the hospital right now,’ explained the resident doctor. ‘Some patients are waiting up to 15 hours before they are transferred out of A&E.’
As we had only been in our chair for half that time, I estimated a long night ahead of us.
What was more terrifying: the fact that my mother had suffered a stroke, or that the NHS of my childhood, the one that would always sweep in and make everything right again, was clearly now nothing more than a distant memory?
My iPhone log tells me I called 999 at 10.51am. My mum was finally settled in a bed on a ward at 1.30am the next day. All in all, it had indeed taken almost 15 hours between me reporting the symptoms of a stroke in my mother, to her receiving the correct care for it. But the wait wouldn’t end there.
Time is of the essence when it comes to treating a stroke – hence the F.A.S.T. acronym that the NHS itself spent a lot of money promoting.
But it is also crucial when it comes to recovering from such an emergency. The first three to six months post-stroke are the most important in terms of seeing improvements to the areas of the brain that have been affected; after that, healing is possible, but much slower.
I only discovered this after we paid for my mum to see a private specialist earlier this week – a desperate move we made after the daily occupational therapy appointments she had been promised failed to materialise.
We are incredibly lucky we can afford to plug the gap, and my mum will probably be OK – after a few days in hospital, she is now staying with us, back to attempting Codewords and enjoying dog walks with her granddaughter.
I dread to think about the other patients who sat alongside her in the corridors that awful day, not to mention the person who’d stopped breathing. Did an ambulance make it to them in time?
I find myself thinking this often – that, and how terrifying it is that in the year 2025, this is even a question that needs to be asked.
