Fun and Games with the NHS
So, for a few days now Nick has been having problems with his eyes which we assumed were hay fever related - not a big stretch seeing as he was sneezing non-stop as well, and it's that time of year. His eyes were incredibly itchy, and try as he might he just couldn't stop rubbing them. Clarityn also did nothing for him (although it did stop the sneezing).
Yesterday I'm woken at the ungodly hour of half one in the afternoon (shut up, I was up all night doing an STF with friends) by the sound of Nick in obvious pain in the bathroom. After a few minutes he comes through and asks if I'd mind going into town for him and getting him an eye bath as his left eye is rather painful.
I get to look at the eye in question. One half of it isn't just bloodshot, but just red (and the other half of the eye is getting that way) - and we're talling about the actually eyeball here, the part that's usually that lovely, healthy shade of white. Furthermore, not only is the entire area around the eye swollen, but his eyeball itself has apparently swollen up and is protruding over the lip of his lower eyelid. Yeah, I'd say that qualifies as 'painful' alright.
So I drag myself up out of bed and head into town, feeling like I'm going to melt the whole time as it's still so bloody hot round here right now (and to top it off when I got into town there were places that normally sell ice cream open... mutter grumble). I ask at our local Boots about what they think would be best for this eye problem, and after giving me some hay fever eyedrops the pharmacist also adds that, from the sound of things, he needs to see a doctor pretty sharpish, especially if the eye drops don't give him any relief. When I get back I relay all this to Nick, and then add my own caveat - if the drops don't offer any relief whatsoever within 45 minutes or so of putting them in, I would be calling the out-of-hours GP for him whether he liked it or not.
Obviously the drops did no good (because otherwise this would be a rather anti-climactic story), so I called up the out-of-hours service. Gave the details to the woman on the phone and described Nick's eye to them (it was not starting to look like something you might see in a horror movie). The woman agreed that he needed to see a doctor... and told us to come into the surgery in Basford.
She was rather put out when we said that wouldn't be possible, because of the twin problems of (a) not having a car, and (b) not knowing where the hell Basford was. Her tone was very much one of "timewasters calling up the service who can't be bothered to come in", which got me rather annoyed and very nearly led to me giving her a rant about why people always assume that everyone on this planet has a bloody car - but I passed the phone onto Nick instead, who just repeated the situation. Eventually she compromised and had a doctor call us back.
(As an aside at this point, I've just looked up Basford on Google maps, as well as how to get there: apparently Basford is in Crewe, 14 miles from where we are if you're driving (a half-hour trip) and with no public transport links. While that might be easy for someone with a car or oodles of money for taxis, it's not very helpful for people who don't fall into one of those two categories. I'm starting to understand why so many people just go to the A&E with minor complaints if this is the alternative.)
The doctor was a little more helpful - reiterating after talking to Nick and having Nick admit that he was in a quite considerable amount of pain (which he doesn't do unless he really, really is) that he needed to see a doctor. However, after hearing us explain again that there was no way we could get to Basford (wherever it was) he said that we should probably go to the local A&E department then.
Nick was unhappy - it meant he had to get dressed.
(Further aside - the journey from where we live to the local A&E department was about 4-and-a-half miles and cost us £5.50 in taxi fares each way. Therefore if we'd gone to Basford by taxi it theoretically would have cost us around £17 each way. Oh, if only we had the money to throw around on taxi fares like that.)
So we get to A&E at quarter to six in the eventing (I checked when we got there). After checking in at reception we get to go sit and wait for triage, so they could assess how urgent Nick's case was and try to make things go smoothly. The waiting room for the A&E in general was really pretty small, and so it was also pretty full. For the most part it was also impossible to tell what most people were there for except in a few cases, thus making my life a little more boring as I'm a terrible people-watcher and like to try to work out what's up with everyone. The ones who were obvious were people who'd been given those little cardboard kidney bowls -obviously they were in the habit of throwing up - and a couple of people who had bleeding wounds, usually knees or elbows or foreheads. While we were in triage we got to sit next to a family who had come in because the daughter (who was in her late teens) had a toothache of some sort. Considering she was laughing and talking while waiting, it couldn't have been that bad, and sure enough after going through triage they left, probably after being told to just go to a dentist in the morning.
One thing that amused me was that everyone who saw Nick, from reception to triage to the doctor who finally saw us, had as their first question, "What happened to your eye?" in the tone that anticipated the answer, "Someone hit me in it." Poor Nick - people look at him and automatically expect him to be two degrees off 'common thug'... which makes it even more amusing when he gets to tell them his job is "IT consultant".
So, after triage we get told to wait in the 'main' area to be called, so we go and wait. And wait. And wait some more. All the while, there's no fans or air conditioning in the waiting area (unless you count the doors), no working drinks machine (that only dispensed hot drinks anyway) and a thieving bastard of a snacks machine (I lost 50p trying to get a pack of scampi and lemon crisps). Eventually we heard rumours of a drinks machine elsewhere on the hospital grounds, so I set off to find it and get a drink for Nick, which turned out to involve a 15-minute walk up a hill, but he was ill so he needed the drink more than me.
We were waiting for about three hours. During that time we saw a lot of people who were limping, being supported on someone as they tried to walk and in one case being outright carried - and all of them were wearing thong sandals. This has led me to the conclusion that thong sandals are obviously dangerous to ankles and feet. For a while, we also were sat next to a nice old lady and her sister/daughter/friend. The old lady had obviously taken a nasty fall and had already been seen - her wrist was bandaged, she had a couple of stitches in her eyebrow and cuts all down her legs - and ECG pads still on her legs because they'd had to do a CT scan and had left them on in case they needed to do another one. She was in a hospital wheelchair, and waiting for either the results of the CT or to be taken home. All I know is that they must have been there longer than us, and were still waiting when we finally left at 10pm.
Eventually Nick gets called, and gets to have his sight tested in each eye as part of the exam. Predictably, the sight in the swollen eye is bloody awful. The doctor then calls in a nurse to have a look, and we get to hear phrases like "jellified lump on the eyeball" and "blisters forming under the eyelid". Lovely. They decide to call in a more senior doctor for his opinion, but also give Nick some local anaethetic for his eye, which apparently made everything go wonderfully numb for him there for the first time in two days. Then they put neon yellow dye in his eye as well for another look, and eventually came up with a diagnosis.
Bacterial conjunctivitis.
I bloody hope it's not contageous.
So now Nick has some eye ointment that he gets to put under his eyelid every two hours, and antibiotics to take four times a day for five days. The oinment apparently stings like anything (as I gather from the muffled swearing and banging on the wall of the bathroom every two hours) but already his eye is looking better. Well, it's not looking much worse, anyway. And it's apparently not as painfully itching either.
But all in all, this has reminded me yet again of why our health service (at least in the local area) completely and utterly sucks. Oh, I'm not complaining about the A&E - they did a good job, and were obviously very busy and dealing with everything as best they could - but what the hell is the point of having an out-of-hours service in a different bloody phone code to the area your potential patients are in? Is it really too much of me, as a taxpayer, to expect a more local service (not to mention one that didn't treat you like a muppet and go all rude and condescending to you when you say that you don't know where the hell the surgery you're being told to go to is, and have no way of getting there anyway?
Then again, this isn't a new thing. When my mother was ill, and we finally decided that she needed to go into hospital, I was calling the out-of-hours service at seven in the morning to try to get a doctor out for her. The message I got said that the out-of-hours service closed at 7am (what a coincidence!) and that I needed to call our regular GP. Who didn't open till 8:30am. So we had one-and-a-half hours of waiting around before we could even speak to a bloody doctor (and we won't even go into the clusterfuck that happened when he arrived), where my mother was pretty much delirious with pain and we could do nothing for her. And this was 14 years ago.
And people wonder why I dislike and distrust the NHS.
Yesterday I'm woken at the ungodly hour of half one in the afternoon (shut up, I was up all night doing an STF with friends) by the sound of Nick in obvious pain in the bathroom. After a few minutes he comes through and asks if I'd mind going into town for him and getting him an eye bath as his left eye is rather painful.
I get to look at the eye in question. One half of it isn't just bloodshot, but just red (and the other half of the eye is getting that way) - and we're talling about the actually eyeball here, the part that's usually that lovely, healthy shade of white. Furthermore, not only is the entire area around the eye swollen, but his eyeball itself has apparently swollen up and is protruding over the lip of his lower eyelid. Yeah, I'd say that qualifies as 'painful' alright.
So I drag myself up out of bed and head into town, feeling like I'm going to melt the whole time as it's still so bloody hot round here right now (and to top it off when I got into town there were places that normally sell ice cream open... mutter grumble). I ask at our local Boots about what they think would be best for this eye problem, and after giving me some hay fever eyedrops the pharmacist also adds that, from the sound of things, he needs to see a doctor pretty sharpish, especially if the eye drops don't give him any relief. When I get back I relay all this to Nick, and then add my own caveat - if the drops don't offer any relief whatsoever within 45 minutes or so of putting them in, I would be calling the out-of-hours GP for him whether he liked it or not.
Obviously the drops did no good (because otherwise this would be a rather anti-climactic story), so I called up the out-of-hours service. Gave the details to the woman on the phone and described Nick's eye to them (it was not starting to look like something you might see in a horror movie). The woman agreed that he needed to see a doctor... and told us to come into the surgery in Basford.
She was rather put out when we said that wouldn't be possible, because of the twin problems of (a) not having a car, and (b) not knowing where the hell Basford was. Her tone was very much one of "timewasters calling up the service who can't be bothered to come in", which got me rather annoyed and very nearly led to me giving her a rant about why people always assume that everyone on this planet has a bloody car - but I passed the phone onto Nick instead, who just repeated the situation. Eventually she compromised and had a doctor call us back.
(As an aside at this point, I've just looked up Basford on Google maps, as well as how to get there: apparently Basford is in Crewe, 14 miles from where we are if you're driving (a half-hour trip) and with no public transport links. While that might be easy for someone with a car or oodles of money for taxis, it's not very helpful for people who don't fall into one of those two categories. I'm starting to understand why so many people just go to the A&E with minor complaints if this is the alternative.)
The doctor was a little more helpful - reiterating after talking to Nick and having Nick admit that he was in a quite considerable amount of pain (which he doesn't do unless he really, really is) that he needed to see a doctor. However, after hearing us explain again that there was no way we could get to Basford (wherever it was) he said that we should probably go to the local A&E department then.
Nick was unhappy - it meant he had to get dressed.
(Further aside - the journey from where we live to the local A&E department was about 4-and-a-half miles and cost us £5.50 in taxi fares each way. Therefore if we'd gone to Basford by taxi it theoretically would have cost us around £17 each way. Oh, if only we had the money to throw around on taxi fares like that.)
So we get to A&E at quarter to six in the eventing (I checked when we got there). After checking in at reception we get to go sit and wait for triage, so they could assess how urgent Nick's case was and try to make things go smoothly. The waiting room for the A&E in general was really pretty small, and so it was also pretty full. For the most part it was also impossible to tell what most people were there for except in a few cases, thus making my life a little more boring as I'm a terrible people-watcher and like to try to work out what's up with everyone. The ones who were obvious were people who'd been given those little cardboard kidney bowls -obviously they were in the habit of throwing up - and a couple of people who had bleeding wounds, usually knees or elbows or foreheads. While we were in triage we got to sit next to a family who had come in because the daughter (who was in her late teens) had a toothache of some sort. Considering she was laughing and talking while waiting, it couldn't have been that bad, and sure enough after going through triage they left, probably after being told to just go to a dentist in the morning.
One thing that amused me was that everyone who saw Nick, from reception to triage to the doctor who finally saw us, had as their first question, "What happened to your eye?" in the tone that anticipated the answer, "Someone hit me in it." Poor Nick - people look at him and automatically expect him to be two degrees off 'common thug'... which makes it even more amusing when he gets to tell them his job is "IT consultant".
So, after triage we get told to wait in the 'main' area to be called, so we go and wait. And wait. And wait some more. All the while, there's no fans or air conditioning in the waiting area (unless you count the doors), no working drinks machine (that only dispensed hot drinks anyway) and a thieving bastard of a snacks machine (I lost 50p trying to get a pack of scampi and lemon crisps). Eventually we heard rumours of a drinks machine elsewhere on the hospital grounds, so I set off to find it and get a drink for Nick, which turned out to involve a 15-minute walk up a hill, but he was ill so he needed the drink more than me.
We were waiting for about three hours. During that time we saw a lot of people who were limping, being supported on someone as they tried to walk and in one case being outright carried - and all of them were wearing thong sandals. This has led me to the conclusion that thong sandals are obviously dangerous to ankles and feet. For a while, we also were sat next to a nice old lady and her sister/daughter/friend. The old lady had obviously taken a nasty fall and had already been seen - her wrist was bandaged, she had a couple of stitches in her eyebrow and cuts all down her legs - and ECG pads still on her legs because they'd had to do a CT scan and had left them on in case they needed to do another one. She was in a hospital wheelchair, and waiting for either the results of the CT or to be taken home. All I know is that they must have been there longer than us, and were still waiting when we finally left at 10pm.
Eventually Nick gets called, and gets to have his sight tested in each eye as part of the exam. Predictably, the sight in the swollen eye is bloody awful. The doctor then calls in a nurse to have a look, and we get to hear phrases like "jellified lump on the eyeball" and "blisters forming under the eyelid". Lovely. They decide to call in a more senior doctor for his opinion, but also give Nick some local anaethetic for his eye, which apparently made everything go wonderfully numb for him there for the first time in two days. Then they put neon yellow dye in his eye as well for another look, and eventually came up with a diagnosis.
Bacterial conjunctivitis.
I bloody hope it's not contageous.
So now Nick has some eye ointment that he gets to put under his eyelid every two hours, and antibiotics to take four times a day for five days. The oinment apparently stings like anything (as I gather from the muffled swearing and banging on the wall of the bathroom every two hours) but already his eye is looking better. Well, it's not looking much worse, anyway. And it's apparently not as painfully itching either.
But all in all, this has reminded me yet again of why our health service (at least in the local area) completely and utterly sucks. Oh, I'm not complaining about the A&E - they did a good job, and were obviously very busy and dealing with everything as best they could - but what the hell is the point of having an out-of-hours service in a different bloody phone code to the area your potential patients are in? Is it really too much of me, as a taxpayer, to expect a more local service (not to mention one that didn't treat you like a muppet and go all rude and condescending to you when you say that you don't know where the hell the surgery you're being told to go to is, and have no way of getting there anyway?
Then again, this isn't a new thing. When my mother was ill, and we finally decided that she needed to go into hospital, I was calling the out-of-hours service at seven in the morning to try to get a doctor out for her. The message I got said that the out-of-hours service closed at 7am (what a coincidence!) and that I needed to call our regular GP. Who didn't open till 8:30am. So we had one-and-a-half hours of waiting around before we could even speak to a bloody doctor (and we won't even go into the clusterfuck that happened when he arrived), where my mother was pretty much delirious with pain and we could do nothing for her. And this was 14 years ago.
And people wonder why I dislike and distrust the NHS.