That evening, at around 9.13pm, his son called him asking him if he was heading out that evening, but he told his son that he was going to stay home as he had work the next day.

“A bit after the phone call, he got up to go to the bathroom, and I hear him fall over. Usually, if he hurts himself or something, I’ll hear him shout or say something… but this time I didn’t hear anything, he wasn’t making a sound.”

Louise went to check up on him, and found him on the floor, having a sort of “fit”.

“At 9.17pm, I called 112, and put the phone down next to us and I tried to get his tongue out so he doesn’t choke. He was trying to get up himself but I kept telling him not to exhaust himself… soon enough he began to turn purple and he peed under himself.”

Louise grabbed her partner’s phone and tried calling the emergency number from his mobile phone out of desperation.

“When I heard that I was going to the answering machine again, I called my dad to call as well.”

“When I called my father, he complained because he had called 112, and he was sent to the recording machine, so he called 196 and they put him back on hold, and he called 112 and was told that an ambulance had been dispatched – but my dad angrily told her ‘it’s too late by now!'”

Eventually, she got through herself and was asked if she could still feel a pulse.

“When they kept asking me about the pulse, I couldn’t really help at that time… I wasn’t sure what to do, I’m not a doctor…” she said between sobs.

In total, the entire ordeal lasted just a few minutes, but it was in those precious minutes that Louise turned to Malta’s emergency services for help. 

Hours after her partner passed away, Louise has been left feeling frustrated and disappointed that the moment her family needed immediate support from emergency services, she was left waiting, and she can’t help but wonder if her partner might still be alive if she had been answered immediately.

“It’s just so painful to me, that as a citizen you call during an emergency and they put you on waiting… I had never heard of this before in Malta, and when I told the paramedic that eventually arrived, she told me, ‘thats how we’ve become, there’s too much pressure due to COVID-19 so there’s not enough people’.”

“What really hurt me was that they put me through to the answering machine, when they could have maybe made it in time to save him.”

While praising the paramedics who eventually arrived, Louise hopes that something can be done to ensure that no families ever have to go through what hers did last night in their home in Ħal Lija.

“But we aren’t going to get him back anyway… it’s just a real shame that you call for emergency help and you are left listening to the waiting tone… as if I want to listen to music when I’m going through something like that.”

“It was so cruel… he was fighting, fighting for his life, and they just played the hold music… even the doctor, when she saw how he was, that he had lost control of his bladder, it showed that it was serious, but all she could say was: ‘we are sorry but unfortunately we are very busy’.”

Her partner’s body has been taken to the mortuary and will now be undergoing an autopsy to confirm what his death resulted from.

Following his death, Mark’s son sent a heartfelt tribute to his father, saying: “I will love you until my very last breath”.

Just yesterday, Malta recorded a record amount of COVID-19 cases on the island, with 733 cases found, putting a major strain on Malta’s health services.

Have you had any experiences calling for emergency services recently?