Late in the afternoon of Aug. 5, as Mr. Ng lay on a gurney, hours away from death and still under guard, she and his wife held up his sons, 3 and 1. "Brother, don't worry, don't be afraid," Ms. Zhao said, repeating her last words to him.
He was not yet sick enough to be formally admitted, though, so he sat on a gurney for six hours and was charged $1,085 for a bag of intravenous salt water he didn't really need.
Only if more sophisticated testing or equipment is needed should the patient have to undergo the traumatic experience of being taken by ambulance to an ED in another building, and then forced to lie on a gurney for many hours until all testing is completed and analyzed.
Once, she was kept waiting on a gurney, in a hallway, for hours.
Not quite two hours later, a gurney carrying Paula was led to the same OR.
They spend hours on a gurney in a yellow-tiled shower room, heated to 90 degrees, while surgeons and trauma technicians wash away charred skin and bone and infected tissue.
In the 1980's she played the title role in Christopher Durang's "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You," Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing" at Circle in the Square, Klytemnestra in Ezra Pound's "Elektra" and the august mother in "The Cocktail Hour" by Mr. Gurney.
No one will know of how you were forced to go through all seven stages of grieving in the course of the following hour, before the gurney could be found, the anesthesiologist summoned, and the scalpel sterilized.
It is easy to get left for hours unattended on a gurney or starved and freaked when surgeries are perpetually postponed or distressed and bruised when the bindings on limbs are roughly or hastily applied.
Davis spent his last hours strapped to a gurney waiting for the decision.
Waiting for an ambulance and physically moving Clare into the ED took more than half an hour, followed by almost six hours spent on a gurney in the ED without being allowed to have any food or medication.
