Don Donovan: Anger only way to cure our increasingly sick society

She's nearly 70. I've known her for 65 years, we started school together aged 5. Last week something went wrong inside her; a fuse blew. She suddenly became partially paralysed, couldn't talk, couldn't walk, arms pretty useless. So her husband (also an old mate) called the user-pays ambulance and they took him and her off to the local hospital.

They arrived at 6pm and she was laid horizontal in the waiting room, surrounded by others of the ailing of North Shore and Waitakere. Ten hours later - do you mind if I repeat that? - 10 hours later, she was put into bed in a ward. She's since had some tests but they're puzzled because while a stroke comes to mind, strokes usually affect one side of the body whereas her affliction is on both sides. So she has been sent home without a clear diagnosis.

They telephoned her husband, telling him to come and pick her up. So he, impressively diabetic, travelled a considerable distance, only to be told that he couldn't take her home after all because she hadn't yet been signed off by the doctor - too busy, see.

So he did it all again next day and, lucky this time, managed to rescue her. Feisty gal, she's fighting back now, her legs ill-controlled but she speaks clearly and her arms are beginning to go quite well. Best of all, she's gone from being resigned to getting angry.

I know how angry she feels. I went into the same waiting room with suspected deep vein thrombosis a few months ago, having been bounced off an expensive after-hours clinic. I spent about five hours waiting to be seen. Eventually a child doctor examined me, decided that I had a thing called a Baker's cyst but wasn't sure and asked whether I had spent any length of time immobilised in a confined space recently.

"Yes," I replied.

"Where? An aeroplane?"

"No - your **** waiting room."

Next I waited for an older doctor who made the same diagnosis as his junior but perforce delegated upwards. The specialist arrived at the stage in the process when I felt likely to solve all of our problems by dying of starvation. He confirmed his inferiors' diagnoses but insisted that I spend a night in the hospital so I could be first in the queue to get an ultra-sound scan next day.

As I live only 15 minutes away, I offered to go home and come back in the morning, reasoning that my absence would make a much-needed bed available for a bottle-faced drunk or smashed-up rugby player. The senior doctor arched a cynical eyebrow and counselled me that I wouldn't be seen for a week if I did that.

And so to bed. And then a nurse had to steal a pillow from another bed because there aren't enough to go around at that hospital. Next day, the scan cleared me at 9am but I had to wait until 11.30am before a specialist, or registrar or whatever they call them, came, dogged by a flotilla of learners, to tell me that, yes, I had a Baker's cyst and could go home.

I mustn't complain, though, because I'm lucky. Another old friend died of congestive heart failure last year in the corridor of a Christchurch hospital where he'd been parked unattended for some hours. Easy come, easy go.

Somebody was taken to task in the media for having opined that New Zealand was descending towards Third World status. Perhaps it's not that bad but there's no doubt that we are descending, luge-like.

It's not just health (although having to pay $50 for 15 minutes with a GP and then cough up another large sum for ongoing medication makes a nonsense of our welfare health services); no, it's other indications of failure in the system.

But perhaps I should not go into a totally inadequate roading system that accommodates rolling stock that belches more smoke per square centimetre than any old cow; an education system that sends Hibiscus Coast primary school children home for two days because a water main bursts (completely disrupting the lives of hundreds of parents, their families and employers); a Treasury that happily records inflation at no more than 2 per cent when every bill every ordinary person pays has risen vastly (for example, ARC rates, local-body rates, petrol, and waste disposal); and governments that squander our money on petty squabbling over who owns what, who works in whose department, who needs post-traumatic counselling, who paid for the surveillance cameras that nobody monitors, and whether an imported politician should lose his seat because he's more imported than the rest of us who were all imported in the first place.

The danger in all this is that we slide into a state of mind where we accept all of these shortcomings as being normal and then put up with them. We're too good at putting up with things when what we should all do is get angry, like my old friend.

That sort of anger is a sign of returning health and the sooner we restore our society to its former health, the better.

We can do it; we get a chance every three years to say shape up or ship out.