That was a lesson in heartlessness - through no fault of the medical staff - that I don't forget, which is why Danielle McKay's struggle to save her hearing has had my full attention.
Danielle is 22, the age I was when my mother died. In March this year she was told she'd be totally deaf within six months. That deadline is up.
We're told that market forces manages these things. The trouble is that 22-year-old women can't usually afford health insurance, which in any case wouldn't pay up for a pre-existing medical problem. They are also unlikely to have $90,000 in the bank, nor will many parents.
Danielle has waited years to get on to a public hospital waiting list on which 80 per cent of people who meet the criteria for surgery are routinely turned away.
The health system has been funding enough cochlear implants for 40-70 adults a year, despite 214 people needing them. Whose idea is this, and what is their excuse?
The YesWeCare funding coalition and Danielle presented a petition with 26,643 signatures to Parliament last week asking the Prime Minister to give her a publicly funded implant before it's too late.
And - wow! - what with an election imminent, money for an extra 60 implants has been found. It's unclear whether that's a one-off, but let's abandon cynicism and hope it isn't.
And Danielle?
She still doesn't get her implant. She's still too far down the list.
What might bureaucracy say that could comfort her, especially when bureaucracy has plenty of money to throw at fun things like rich men's yacht races while it underfunds serious things like hospitals? No wonder she says she doesn't feel valued.
According to the latest figures from Seek, GPs are the top earners in this country, though there aren't enough of them.
The "market" seems to be sorting that problem out with a rise in "alternative" practitioners who are, of course, not medically trained at all.
They do courses and get certificates, but are accountable to no professional body when their "treatments" backfire.
That doesn't stop them charging like professionals while the Government turns a blind eye.
Belief in this alternative system is why one of my relations has a costly heap of pills from health shops sitting on his dining table, prescribed for him creatively by shop assistants who can read the labels just as he can, and therefore help to cure whatever ails him. Meanwhile he can't afford to see the doctor regularly.
Alternative practitioners may be well-meaning, but they thrive on the false hope of cures based on unscientific notions.
Jane Norcross-Wilkins was one of these. She had terminal cancer when she approached a naturopath for help, only to find that a regime of over-priced pills and consultation fees did nothing whatsoever to help her.
She died, and her husband is now urging the Government - whichever we get - to make registration of naturopaths compulsory.
The internet will tell you anything. In a quick trawl I found a German who recommends 13 glasses of fruit juice daily for cancer, along with daily coffee or camomile enemas; someone in India who claims to cure 70 per cent of brain tumours; and someone who knows how to shrink a cancerous tumour from the inside. People will believe it. My mother might have.
I once watched a snake oil merchant at work in Shanghai, with a queue of elderly women cheerily miming aches and pains he miraculously "cured".
That comedy didn't seem much different to me from the host of iridologists, chakra readers and naturopaths here who do no harm to the worried well, but are mere sideline entertainers to the dying.
Meanwhile Danielle, and many others, will soon be totally, unnecessarily, deaf.
Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.
