I would have taken her myself, but I couldn't fit her wheelchair in the car, so we waited.Īt 7am, I rang my son, who has a hatchback, and he took us to hospital, where she stayed for six weeks.

We called the GP, who said she needed to go to hospital immediately, and that we should call 999. The infection was so bad that she became more and more confused and started drifting in and out of consciousness. Mike Yeats, Cheshire: Last December my 77-year-old wife Jan fell ill with a nasty urinary tract infection. He said he thought he was having a heart attack, though he had no history of cardiac problems. One reader, Ava Sanderson, tries not to think about what her father James, 66, 'an avid golfer and a robust man', went through in his last hours at the Surrey flat where he lived by himself.Īva has listened to his emergency call made in May, when he sounded 'calm, not panicking'. Scores of harrowing replies revealed the devastating impact on patients and their loved ones.Īnd medical charities are now warning that heart and stroke patients could die unnecessarily or be left permanently disabled after suffering long delays in getting medical attention. A healthy ex-rugby player who collapsed without warning and died 'in terrible pain' due to internal bleeding after an ambulance took ten hours to get to him.Īn 85-year-old woman with a broken pelvis who endured an agonising 24-hour wait after her husband rang 999.Ī previously fit man in his mid-60s dying alone of a heart attack when paramedics were delayed for two-and-a-half hours.Īfter highlighting Britain's worsening ambulance crisis last week, The Mail on Sunday asked readers to contact us with their experiences.

Britney meltdown