Policlinico, hours of suffering in the emergency room: "My 96-year-old mother was forced to lie on chairs."

She arrived at the emergency room dehydrated and weakened , but for her—she will turn 96 in a few months—there wasn't even a stretcher available. Teresa Falco, who had been living in Sardinia for two months with her daughter, spent over five hours in the emergency room at the Monserrato Polyclinic, lying on three chairs pushed together, supported by her nephew, who tried to ease the pain by holding her head.

It's a bittersweet story told by Apollonia Antonella Centonze, the woman's daughter, who, along with her son, accompanied her elderly mother to the hospital after consulting 118. "We were worried because my mother had a collapse yesterday, so after calling her GP and the gastroenterologist who's been treating her for weeks, they told us to take her to the emergency room urgently because she was at risk of dehydration. So we decided to take her immediately to the hospital, without wasting any time," she explains.

They arrived at the emergency room at 5:15 PM. After checking in at triage, Centonze says, there was no indication of the assigned code or the timeframe. And most importantly, there were no stretchers available. "My mother spends most of her time in bed because she can't sit up. I asked several times, but we were told there weren't any. In the end, just to get her to lie down, we used chairs."

The following hours, her daughter continues, were an ordeal: constant need to go to the bathroom, no showerhead, and not even toilet paper. "It was humiliating. After yet another cry for help and a fit of rage, we left around 10 p.m. I took her to the emergency medical service in Cagliari, and there she finally received the attention she needed. She spent the most peaceful night."

Meanwhile, bitterness and anger emerge from Apollonia Centonze's words: "I never thought something like this could happen in a region that's part of a civilized country. It felt like we were in the Third World."

The Policlinico's response was swift: they confirmed that the woman had been properly registered and, given her condition, had been assigned a green code. "Unfortunately, several patients in much more serious conditions arrived at the emergency room at the same time, and they were given priority," management explained.