Why do some elderly people not want to bother people when they are in need of urgent help?

People may say that I'm wrong to be angry about this, but it's just so frustrating.

My partner's elderly mother pays for a telecare system, which comes with an emergency button worn on a necklace.  You press the button, and it goes straight through to a call centre, and their staff can talk to you via a box on your wall.  It's loud enough to be heard in every room in her house.

Twice in the past couple of months, his mum has telephoned us in such severe pain that we have had to call for an ambulance and she has had to stay in hospital for several days.  

Yesterday, she phoned my partner who broke off the call to ring for an ambulance and then called her back, and talked to her whilst she was crying out in pain for over an hour waiting for them to arrive.  Because the phone line was tied up, the medics couldn't get back in touch with my partner, and had to leave a voicemail which we discovered only after the ambulance had arrived.

Both times, we have asked her why she hasn't used the emergency button which she is wearing around her neck, and she has said that she doesn't like to bother people.  She rang her GP surgery, who told her to ring 999.  She didn't - she rang us instead and had been lying there in agony for several hours before she even called.

What is the point of paying for the damned emergency button if she won't use it?

Something else that I'm really not happy about - later in the evening, my partner rang the hospital to try to find out what was happening.  After being passed around several departments, someone told him rather abruptly that his mum was "in the departure lounge" and then hung up.  We assumed that that meant that she was being sent home.  One of my friends said that she thought it meant that she was dying.

After a few more calls, we discovered she was actually in the Surgical Assessment Unit, waiting for a consultant.  This morning, I did an Internet search on 'departure lounge' and found that it's hospital slang for the geriatric ward - and she wasn't even on the geriatric ward anyway.  

I am absolutely appalled that a medical professional would use that term when talking to an extremely stressed relative, worrying about what's happening to his mum.

Three and a half years

Blimey, three and a half years since I last posted.  That's a bit poor.  I'm so busy that I haven't even had time to rant about things.  Oh well, here's a short digest from the past week:

• I hate working from home.
• My oven blew up.
• My glass top of my hob broke.  Actually it broke ages ago but I've been struggling away with it and it's only because the oven blew up that I finally got round to replacing it.
• AO charges £100 per item for installation, but won't disconnect the old ones - the local electrician charges £40 for the lot.  Support your local tradesman!
• Why do electrical appliance suppliers advertise free delivery, but then when you buy the items you have to pay £30 for delivery because the free delivery is only on a Saturday?
• After bragging to the electrician that I've never had to rewire a fuse in this house, the lighting fuse blew when we removed the dead light bulb from the outside lamp.  At least that's one job I can do myself.
• Why does my neighbour's car have such a loud exhaust and why does he have to leave the house at 5:30 every morning and wake up the whole sodding street?  (No, he's not a shift worker - he's self-employed)
• My garage door is broken so I can't get my bike out, not that I'm allowed to ride it anywhere under lockdown anyway.
• My shower leaks again.  I've only had it re-sealed 5 times so far.  Another job for later today, then.
• Lockdown has made me realise just how many DIY jobs I've been putting off.
• Lockdown doesn't mean anything to one of my neighbours who has had people coming and going almost every day, landscaping the garden, using cement mixers and disc cutters and annoying everyone with their loud radio playing shit pop music.
• The Government.  There's so many things right now that are so wrong that I don't have the energy to list them.