Emergency rooms are supposed to be places where patients receive urgent care, but for my mother, the experience was anything but urgent or careful. On August 24, 2024, she checked into the Royal Jubilee Hospital’s emergency room, presenting with extreme fatigue, chills, aches and pains, and a sharp pain in her left side. Both her personal doctor and the 811 nurse line recommended she seek emergency medical care immediately, fearing a serious underlying condition. When she arrived at the Royal Jubilee ER at 5 p.m., the wait time displayed on the screen was 5 hours and 44 minutes. It seemed daunting, but given her symptoms, she trusted that emergency care would be worth the wait. After explaining her condition to a nurse, she was told to sit and wait until her name was called. Hours passed with little communication. By 1 a.m. (eight hours after she arrived), she was finally moved to an examination room where she waited for the next four hours. At 5 a.m., a doctor came in to conduct blood tests and a CT scan. She was then moved back to the waiting room with no indication of when her results would come. It was now over 12 hours since she’d arrived. Fatigued and in pain, she began to question whether she should have come to the ER at all. While waiting, she met several other patients, each with their own disheartening stories: Patient 1 was removed from the ER after being disruptive. His frustration over the hours-long wait led to an outburst, and instead of receiving care, he was escorted out. Patient 2 had to restart his six-hour wait after leaving the hospital briefly to retrieve his phone charger, missing his name when it was called. Patient 3 left without answers, advised only to book an appointment with a specialist who could take months to see. Patient 4, an 80-year-old woman, waited patiently for over six hours, despite her age and frail condition, without seeing a doctor. None of these individuals would have been in the ER if they weren’t already facing one of the worst days of their lives. While discomfort is inevitable in such situations, the experiences we witnessed demonstrate the issue goes beyond that. It is dangerous. For one, my mother was left unsupervised in an examination room for over four hours. If her condition had worsened during that time, it could have gone unnoticed for hours. In interviews with the CBC, doctors describe patients dying in the hallways of hospitals as they wait to receive care. This is further highlighted by the recent, tragic death of Luanora Irtenkauf in a BC hospital after she waited over 12 hours for emergency treatment. This is a systemic problem that can lead to devastating consequences. Even in cases where the patients don’t die waiting, patients may leave without being diagnosed, or avoid seeking emergency care in the future altogether. This could result in life-threatening conditions being ignored because the cost of waiting seems too high.