To Mike Glodic, intolerable pain isn't a broken arm or shredded rotator cuff. Intolerable pain is sitting in a hospital waiting room seven hours with a broken arm and a shredded rotator cuff.

He discovered this one Friday in late August.

Glodic, 62, a long-time Time Warner tech, was pulling a safety cone from the back of his truck when he fell, badly.

His right arm was broken -- that much was immediately obvious -- and his shoulder felt like it had been torn from the socket.

His wife drove him to the closest emergency room, at the WakeMed main campus.

"They asked me, 'Rate your pain level on a scale of 1 to 10,'" he said. "I told them, '10!' "

Yet, according to Glodic, it took more than seven hours to be seen by a doctor -- an account confirmed by his wife, Evelyn, and their adult daughter, Tara Powell.

They didn't have to sit in the same spot the entire time. Instead, they were moved from one waiting room to another -- creating a false impression of progress.

It's not that hospital personnel ignored them completely -- they were quick, for instance, to get the Glodics' insurance info.

But what really bothered the Glodics was that while Mike was sitting there in extreme pain, his forearm blown up like a football, families with young children were gathered in the waiting room, chatting and laughing, apparently afflicted by more basic and less agonizing ailments.

"Kids were running around and people were coming in and out," Evelyn Glodic said. "By the end of the night, they were gone, and we were still there."

It's a situation that is hardly unique to WakeMed, of course.

In 2007, one national survey of emergency room patients found waits of about four hours for care. At WakeMed, the average wait in the hospital's adult emergency department was 2 hours and 22 minutes between October 2007 and September 2008, said WakeMed chief operating officer Deborah Friberg.

Still, Friberg noted, that varies wildly depending on the day and time. The wait is longer on Mondays, weekends and late afternoons.

On the Friday late afternoon Mike Glodic showed up at WakeMed, Friberg said, 76 patients were competing with him for care, 12 of them in life-threatening situations.

"The reality is, depending on what you come in with determines when you get served," said Friberg. "The sickest come first."

A logical approach. But it doesn't exactly jibe with the Glodics' observations.

And Friberg conceded that the care of the poor and uninsured -- we didn't even discuss the new wave of indigent mentally ill patients -- has taxed emergency rooms at WakeMed and elsewhere.

By law, no one seeking care can be turned away.

But let's just say Mike Glodic was underwhelmed by the service he received as a result. It was a painful reminder of why health care "needs fixin' " -- even amidst an economic meltdown.

"It took six hours before I even got some painkiller," he said.

When I met Glodic a few weeks ago at his home in Knightdale, he was still sporting his cast and preparing for shoulder surgery. He won't be back to work for months.

That will give him plenty of time to study the presidential candidates' positions on our ailing health care system.

You might say the system's in pain. On a scale of 1 to 10, Glodic would rate it, "10!"

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