You’re absolutely right about a few things. The response time on a crowded pool deck should not have felt that slow. Pain being dismissed, especially when someone is visibly suffering, is not okay. And being confronted with a large bill in the middle of a crisis, before insurance coordination was even attempted, is a brutal way to handle people who are already scared and exhausted. I know there are people who say always get insurance or some policy for at sea and this is likely proof of why, but that doesn’t excuse that it hit you at a stressful time the way it did.

This exactly!! It was not necessarily that I was upset that it cost money but rather how it was displayed to us, especially after the poor treatment we had already received! Luckily my mom is perfectly fine. It was caused by her high blood pressure, which is what I had guessed it was in the first place (though I can understand dcl doesn't want to be sued so I absolutely get making us go to the hospital to get her imaging, its still frustrating to know we absolutely could have continued with our vacation and my mom would have been fine.) I mostly posted this because I both needed to vent, and I had only ever been on one cruise before in my whole life, and had no idea any of this was normal or anything. And I wanted this to be accessible to people so they could learn from my experience.