A mother with Crohn’s disease and suffering from abscesses was being treated on a chair in the Emergency Department of University Hospital Limerick on Monday.
She returned to A&E at 10am on Monday and, after being triaged and seen by a doctor within an hour, she was waiting for five hours on a chair in the cramped department to see a surgical doctor. “To be honest with you there’s actually a lot of people sitting on chairs, they seem to have got rid of the trolleys and have put chairs in.“I have Crohn’s disease and with that comes a lot of perianal abscesses – they’re very uncomfortable and very painful, I’ve no cushion.”She said: “I came in by ambulance and I was pretty ill with the disease.
“I had a very bad flare up and I was incontinent at that time, and I was two days in my own faeces. They [staff] were just up the bloody walls, they were doing everything they could, there was just so many [patients].“With Crohn’s disease, you could be visiting the bathroom 30 to 40 times in a day and it’s a matter of urgency, there’s no standing and waiting.