Keep an inflatable neck pillow with you. You can easily keep it folded in a pocket for when you need it, and it’s just as comfortable as a regular pillow (and more convenient to use sitting up in a chair).
@Mariah I spent 12 hours in a hospital waiting room in Montreal with a finger so mangled that you could see the bone sticking out. (A friend’s wheelchair had crushed it when it went down into a water-filled pothole and tipped over, the handle landing on my finger as I also fell with it.) The nurses called me over every couple of hours to ask me about pain. I told them it was an 8 out of 10 and they just nodded, added another layer of bandage over the blood-soaked previous layer, and sent me back out without so much as an aspirin. When I finally got in to see a doctor he gave me a blast of shit for waiting so long, telling me that as a diabetic with an open fracture which had been bathed in ditch water I was virtually guaranteed to get an infection, and he’d have to give me prescriptions for a wide variety of exotic antibiotics.
I have subsequently been told that if you’re quiet and stoic, they’ll keep shuffling you to the end of the line and deny you any pain relief, the thinking being that you can’t be too badly off if you aren’t making a big scene, wailing, and carrying on. I mistakenly thought they were professionals making triage decisions on the basis of medical science and logic.