Sunday September 4, 2022, Madeleine Riffaud, a 98-year-old former resistance fighter, went to the emergency room. She waited 24 hours before finally being taken care of.
Madeleine Riffaud is a former resistance fighter, historian, poet, war correspondent and journalist, now 98 years old. On Sunday September 4, she decided to go to the hospital for medical examinations, because she suffered from the vocal cords after a long Covid. She was transported by the SAMU to the Lariboisière hospital around half past noon. Very quickly she was left on a stretcher, in the middle of other patients and with no way of communicating with his relatives. Her ordeal was only beginning, however, since she will remain there for 24 hourswithout even receiving food.
Indeed, as she confided in an interview with It’s up to you on Tuesday, September 20, the nurses were completely overwhelmed by the situation. “The nurse was overwhelmed and she said “I’m coming!”, “It’s coming”, “It’s working” but she didn’t come. Me, I was in the middle of the crowd, a lady like everyone else. And there I hear around me say ‘But why did we send this poor woman here? She just turned 98, we don’t take them anymore, now we sort. I say to myself, is that what emergencies are now?” she recounted.
Madeleine Riffaud denounces her support in an open letter
After waiting for 24 hours and receiving a glass of lukewarm water after 12 hours, the former resistant was finally transferred to a private clinic, for lack of available beds. Following his support in the “no man’s land“, Madeleine Riffaud decided to publish an open letter on the journal’s website Commune and of The cross. In this forum intended for Nicolas Revel, the director of the APHP, she denounced the worrying state of the public hospital.
In his interview with It’s up to youshe returned to what revolts her the most: government inaction in the face of an emergency. “Governments follow each other and do nothing. Nobody did anything. We had the principle of making the hospital profitable. The hospital has become a factory. And because of that, it was already a mess in 1974. Now it’s still the same, or even worse since the Covid” she said, very weak and still in shock.
If Madeleine Riffaud denounces this situation, it is because she knows it well. In effect, in 1974, she had infiltrated as a nurse’s aide in a cardiovascular surgery department of a Parisian hospital then in the SAMU. The novelist then published the book “The linens of the night“. The work that described the situation of public hospitals went on to sell nearly a million copies. Years later, the 98-year-old laments the fact that the situation is always the samewith in addition the exhaustion of hospital staff due to the health crisis.