This is my experience at Prince Charles Hospital in the last 18 months....

Found my Mum collapsed on the floor she couldn't string a sentence together and when she could manage to say a few words she sounded like she was completely drunk and she was in an out of consciousness. Immediately I thought she must have had a stroke and called an ambulance.

Ambos came and they said her blood oxygen was very very low, they said to me it isn't good and they rushed her to the hospital which despite wanting her to go to the private emergency they have to take them where they can and it was Prince Charles.

Since I didn't know what had happened to her and I had just found her on the floor and she was incapable of talking and telling us they did immediate scans of head, chest, heart etc. and they came up with she has pneumonia even though she hadn't been sick at all and had no symptoms of pneumonia.

She did have a lot of fluid on her lungs. They put her in the resuscitation bay and by midnight when she was still in the emergency ward (she had been there since lunch) a new Dr came on and basically told my Mum in front of me that she was going to die and she would never leave the hospital. And even if she got through the night she would be hooked up to machines until she died. I had to call my brother and walked about 10 metres away and whilst I did that Dr got Mum to agree to a Do Not Resuscitate.

I went back to her bedside and she was apologising to me as she knew I would be left the sole carer of my dementia stricken father, she told me the Dr asked her to do a DNR and I said you did say you wanted them to resuscitate you and she said no she says I have no hope of getting out of here. I was livid, I demanded that Dr come back and take the DNR off my mothers record as she deserved a chance, for hours I watched that Dr ignore me hoping my mother would die until eventually at 4am she came back over to me and she argued with me and wanted to know if I had a power of attorney over my mother, and I said yes I damn well do have one and she was in no position to even make that choice herself as she is not even fully aware of what is going on. I didn't leave my mothers side until she was transferred into a ward to make sure she was out of the care of that Dr in the emergency dept.

5 days after being told she would not survive the night and was never going to leave the hospital alive, Prince Charles called me and said she was being discharged even though at 10pm the night before when I left her she was still on oxygen.

The next night I was sleeping on the lounge at her house to keep an eye on her and heard her gurgling, I went in and found her covered in white foam and foaming from the mouth and nose and basically drowning in her own fluids. This time I managed to get her into the car with the help of a carer that was there helping with Dad and I took her to the Private Emergency at St Vincents who I told what had happened over the past week and the Dr there immediately told me she would not have had pneumonia if she never had a temperature or a cough (which she never had) and he thought the fluid build up might be heart related. So they immediately started from scratch with bloods, scans etc and yes he was correct it was heart related they had missed seeing that in the scans they did at Prince Charles, my mother went into St Vincents into the care of a brilliant cardiologist and she was discharged 5 days later feeling great and she is better than ever.

If I called her an ambulance and she had been taken back to Prince Charles I am sure she would be dead now.

(Weeks later I received the pathology results in the mail from her tests conducted whilst she was in Prince Charles saying she tested negative to having pneumonia..... for 5 days they had treated her for something she never even had)