The tourists who were accompanying their ill friend had already been waiting 13 hours and the late-night casualties were getting rowdier, so we decided to cut our losses.

As we left, the flushed nurse apologised to all present for "this system" before comforting an elderly woman sitting in the chaotic environment. Nine hours to go before the work-to-rule by nurses would begin.

After a ring-around, my resourceful buddy drove me to Tallaght Hospital, hoping it might be less busy . . . and it was. By 1.30am, I'd been through triage, had bloods taken and was on a trolley in a curtained cubicle on an IV drip. An ordinary sore throat had turned into a severe tonsillitis that had left me drooling, aching and unable to speak or swallow.

I've been in A&E units several times before, all but once, thank God, as a working journalist. Previously, I had seen a nurse not even flinch as she tended a stabbed teenager who drew his own blade out of his boot to 'show' her before spitting in her face. I had seen a nurse gently persuade a repeat attendee to acknowledge that she had not again "walked into a door". And I had seen nurses perform any number of clean-up jobs on drunks who thanked them with a stream of expletives and, once, an aggressive grope.

This time, I was the patient, and the nurses were as ever the ones making things bearable. One seemed to be with me for much of the 10 hours I was on the trolley, her kindness as much of a balm as the drugs she was giving me.

And it was a nurse whose hand my fingernails were sunk into while a doctor stuck a very, very long needle down my throat to prod around.

By the time I was moved further in the A&E ward to a bed, the work-to-rule was well underway but I personally felt no ill effect from it.

What I did see was a nurse coax out of a badly-suffering patient that their pain was probably being exacerbated by their sudden withdrawal from an undisclosed alcohol dependency.

I saw a nurse embracing a young woman who was crying at the latest diagnosis a doctor had left her with. And I saw several visitors who seemed to interpret "visiting hours" as the only period when you couldn't visit and "two at a time" as the number of visitors who should stay outside, making it considerably harder for nurses to treat patients.

I was discharged last Wednesday and, on the way out, I saw about a dozen people on trolleys in the corridor and another two dozen waiting outside in 'chairs'. Any A&E I've ever experienced was invariably very busy and patients were invariably on trolleys, industrial action or not.

The Patient Focus Group has this past week reminded nurses that their main duty of care is to their patient rather than their union. I didn't meet any nurse who needed reminding of that fact. But I did meet the humane face of Ireland's ailing health service, doing on a routine basis for complete strangers the kind of messy, smelly, unpleasant tasks that most of us would have to steel ourselves to do for our loved ones.