Your Money or your Life (Part One)

 

There’s far too much stress and tension in the world. So, I’ll let you know at the start of this blog that everybody is fine.  Nobody was injured in the making of this blog.

We are very proud of our NHS in this country, rightly so. Yes, it's dying on its feet. Yes, it's overloaded, but not yet unfit for purpose, but things do need to change.

Just to recap on the lives of those who live in Spooky Towers. There’s been a tsunami of...stuff to do. Things like at 4.45pm the lawyer wanting the current rebuild costs of the practice and all the flats above, if the practice were to blow up. Like that’s the kind of figure that I carry around in my back pocket. A final DLA – Directors Loan Account- figure that had to be given within 14 days, and the lawyer forgot to tell us, and the accountant didn’t know as he was on holiday for the week. 

In practical terms it was coming home from a 12-hour shift seeing patients then Alan and I battering through spreadsheets, not knowing the figure we were looking for, but trying to give the accountant enough information so that he could work it out. And this was with me being able to go into the next treatment room and say to the buyer, "the insurance broker is suggesting this figure and we can adjust it at a later date". Even though that meant the new buyer might be £400 out of pocket for a couple of months until we get the right figure, she said 'Aye, whatever works for you.'  I can’t imagine the stress if I was selling it to somebody that I didn’t know I would probably have backed off the sale as it would be too difficult to cope with.

"England's hospital waiting lists rise to 7.57m"

  And in the background of this we have one mother in a care home and the other mother bed bound since fracturing her heel in mid-February.

On Sunday, Alan’s mum had an incident with another resident in the care home. Nothing bad but he had to manage it while on reception at work while trying to make headway into the figures. It was a day of the two phones ringing at the same time. Then we had to see my mother who always says, ‘have you done anything nice today’. And we say well, 'we’ve been at work since 8am.' And she says, ‘but apart from that have you done anything nice’.

Then at 6.30pm, just as we got home, Alan said that his heart was going a bit funny, 200 beats per minute, down to 50, back up to 210 and he looked quite hot and sweaty. At this point we had two options, to phone NHS 24 where a non-medical person takes you through a questionnaire and a medical person calls you back and says.. A) this is how you manage it B) go up to the out of hours practitioner at the hospital C) go up to accident and emergency. Or D) put the phone down and call an ambulance. The recorded message told us that the phone would be answered in an hour, and I know the call back would maybe be a couple of hours after that. The wait at Accident and Emergency would be 6 or 7 hours and the hospital is 10 minutes away. So, we made a decision to get to A&E so we would be in the best place should anything happen.

Like a heart attack.

                                              

The circus of the waiting area in A&E is a blog all in its own. It’s a bit like Lourdes, if once someone is told it’s 7 hours wait on an uncomfortable chair, while dodging the drunks, they tend to feel better and go home. 

Alan was triaged  quickly and within half and hour we knew there was no heart attack, there was no stroke, and we were sent back out to the waiting room to wait for 7 hours. At the 5 hours mark he was taken in again, more observations, more bloods, then sent back out to wait for the results of the blood tests.

At 2am the doors to casualty opened and the consultant came out, and this is what he said. ‘We are in unprecedented times, the hospital is full, there are no free beds at all. We have capacity for 28 patients in accident and emergency, at the moment we have 73 patients and that does not include you waiting here in the waiting area. So, the situation is now static, nothing can move forward until the patients in the hospital are discharged at 8am. So, anybody sitting in this waiting area has a 6 hour wait from here on in’.

To give him his due, he said if he formed an orderly queue, he would talk to them and offer advice but was unable to offer any treatment.

There was someone there because her cat had scratched her head – a few strips of micropore would have helped that until the GP surgery opened. And then there was the quiet man in the corner who’s bladder hadn’t emptied in 36 hours, and he had gone the opposite route to us, NHS 24,  a one hour wait to get the phone answered, a 2 hour wait for the callback, sent up to the out of hours GP (in the same hospital) where they had a 2 hour wait despite having an appointment. And the result of that is a letter to bring next door to A&E where they waited for another 4 hours and were then told by the consultant that there was another 6 hours to wait without even being seen.

Now medically a bladder like that can be emptied within 3 minutes by an experienced nurse with a catheter, that’s all it would take to offer relief and stop further damage. The cause of it can be left to another day.

We got home at 3 in the morning to being told to live a quiet life pending further tests. On Monday, our GP was very good; he did a call back and arranged appointments quickly so that Alan could go on the relaxing holiday which would do him more good than anything else.

Then my sister phoned at 6am on Tuesday to say that my mother had phoned her in pain, short of breath, thinking that she was either having a heart attack or it was her gallbladder trouble......

It was like getting off the merry-go-round just to get back on again.

Mother is fine, Alan is fine, not quite sure about the NHS. But that’s for another blog.

                                        

Carole