Most people have horror stories about emergency rooms. Whether in Boston, Washington or Los Angeles, the stories are appalling.

Gurneys, sometimes with critically ill patients, lined up and left unattended along walls. Hurting people waiting for hours because of a shortage of staff, beds and a prevailing shortage of resources. Systems that are stressed and seem to be near breaking point.

I have a story about my recent ER visit, which was pure joy and likely saved my life.

The story begins just before Christmas with my travels on crowded Amtrak trains and more overcrowded airplanes.

I was wearing a mask during these trips and I had gotten flu and COVID shots, but I caught the flu. I received prompt and proper treatment, but I wasn’t licking it.

The Saturday before Christmas, early in the morning, I had a fever hallucination: I sat bolt upright in bed and told my wonderful wife, Linda Gasparello, that I was preparing my maiden speech to the British House of Commons.

As I hadn’t set foot in the UK parliament for years, and then only in the press gallery, this insane bravado led her to call an ambulance at 2 a.m. — over my protests that I was getting better and taking a Tylenol would take care of everything. “Just you see,” I said.

What Linda saw was a very sick man, clearly delirious and in need of urgent medical help.

Kindly men from the West Warwick (Rhode Island) Fire Department’s ambulance service quietly entered our apartment and wafted me into the ambulance, where they checked my vital signs, did an electrocardiogram and other work. I was in good, strong, comforting and knowledgeable hands.

When they were done, they drove me a few miles to Kent Hospital, part of Care New England, which has the second-busiest ER in the state. Not auspicious? Read on.

I wasn’t parked along a wall or interrogated about my insurance but rushed straight to waiting nurses and the emergency medical technicians until I was hooked up to an IV, and a doctor had seen me. Soon afterward, I was seen by two doctors.

Emergency rooms are, by all accounts, hellholes. I expected the worst, but I got two days of excellent care and pleasant attention. I have stayed at some of the best hotels in the world, including the Carlyle in New York, the Ritz in Paris, the Hassler in Rome and Brown’s in London, and I had the same feeling of well-being at the Kent Hospital ER — people who cared and told me they were just a bell-ring away.

When my vitals were stable in a few days, I was invited to participate in a unique and remarkable system called “Kent Hospital at Home.”

Under this system (some form of which is operational at nearly 400 hospitals in 39 states), select patients can go home without being discharged, and the home becomes a hospital room. You are hooked up to a monitor, which sends data about your vitals to ER nurses. You can read these on an iPad, with contact information for the nurses and doctors assigned to you. You also get an emergency alarm on a wristband.

Everything the patient might have needed in the hospital is transported to the home. This might include an IV, oxygen and other necessary equipment that might be used in the ER.

Best of all, you get visits twice daily from a nurse and once a day from a doctor, either in person or virtual. I was in the system for just two days before discharge and saw the doctor in my home once and on Zoom once. I was given his cell phone number with instructions to call whenever needed.

The hospital-at-home concept was pioneered by the Mayo Clinic, among other medical facilities, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has a waiver from Medicare, which means that you are billed as an in-hospital patient, not an outpatient.

Kent Hospital emphasized that when it moved me from the hospital to my home — in their vehicle — it was a “transfer,” not in any way a discharge.

Research suggests that hospital-at-home care saves the provider between 19 percent and 30 percent on keeping the same patient in the hospital.

I am grateful to all who played a role in my recovery, from the ambulance crew to the emergency nurses, doctors, radiologists and porters.

Also, I am grateful for an insight into how medicine should work and how it will be enhanced in the future through technology that makes hospital-at-home care possible and viable.

For the record, I had Influenza A and sepsis pneumonia. I had magnificent treatment, and I thank all who handed me a Christmas present beyond value. And I even saw a doctor making a house call. I wasn’t hallucinating.