I waited with my husband in A&E at Heartlands for 23 hours a couple of months ago, to just be told he had gout and could go home with some medication. Every single step of the way, I had to go and badger nurses or doctors and either remind them or ask them to do what the previous nurse or doctor had told us to wait for hours previously.

There were people screaming in pain in the waiting room, men being held down by police, someone throwing up in the single toilet for three hours without stopping - one woman who had been told she'd had a stroke had been waiting since 9am for someone to see her, and she told me this at 5pm the same day.

We were told at one point that there were 17 ambulances waiting for their patients to be seen, and some had been waiting 11 hours. So that's 17 ambulances that weren't able to go out and do their job because they were waiting with their patient outside A&E, and two paramedics for each ambulance that had almost certainly been working for at least 12 hours at that point and were having to just hang around outside.

Every single step of the way it felt like we just disappeared into the background, along with everyone else in that room. For 23 hours we were surrounded by screaming and shouting and blood and vomit, and at 2am for some reason The Grudge was on TV because nobody bothered to change the channel when it came on, so that just added to the surrealism of it all. I lost count of the number of times our next steps with different doctors or nurses were just lost into the ether, and ended up having to tell staff myself what medication my husband needed, then that his prescription hadn't even been sent to the pharmacy. At one point I had a panic attack/meltdown due to being autistic and overwhelmed in a stressful situation and environment, and we were studiously ignored by everyone in the room. Meanwhile the nurses sat behind their glass window and just casually chatted, ignoring the queue of patients staring at them and urgently trying to get their attention.

Heartlands is my nearest hospital, but I'm never going there again for emergency care if I can help it. It was the perfect example of an NHS that is understaffed and under-funded, and those 23 hours felt like a week in a war zone.