After being hit by a car while bicycling , I was left forgotten on a cot in the hallway of the overcrowded hospital not in the U . S . . There wasn ' t enough space in the hallway , so I was pushed just past a set of doors into the adjoining hall to make room . This happened right around the change to the night shift , and it seems that no one bothered to inform anyone on the next shift that I ' d been put there . From that moment on , everyone on staff seemed to think I was someone else ' s responsibility . The people working the hallway never went through the doors , because why would they ? Meanwhile , staff in my new hallway were all busy with the patients who actually had beds . Whenever I managed to flag one down they insisted that someone else would check on me soon , even when I pointed out that I hadn ' t been attended to in hours and my IVs were empty and backed up with blood . Approximately 8 hours into this , all of my pain medications had long since worn off . I got to experience every single injury without the benefit of the initial endorphin rush . The pain was severe enough that I was only dimly aware of what was happening around me . Luckily , the screaming finally got me seen to , but I wasn ' t out of the woods yet . The person who came to see me still wouldn ' t give me any painkillers , citing concerns about interactions with the anaesthesia for my coming surgery which didn ' t end up happening for a week , but that ' s another story . So I got to wait for someone from the surgical department to come consult . That angel took one look at me , ran to get an IV bag , and directed every expletive in his expansive vocabulary at the staff while they hooked me up . I love that man like a brother , and I never even caught his name . I ' m retrospect , I think some monster on staff just wanted to fuck with the foreigner . On the bright side , my 110 pain scale is now perfectly calibrated .