Breaking my own rules.

Rules are meant to be broken, time to break my own rules.

I’d been taken to St. Peter’s Hospital, Chertsey last year with a broken ankle but was diagnosed with a sprain and sent home with it all plastered up, to come back a week later.

In fact it was dislocated and broken – no hairline fracture either. I was horrified by this treatment and started a Blog campaign to be a focus for whistle blowers and a demand to change things. It’s nearly a year ago – I’ll do a review of what happened for the anniversary.

I started this Blog because
helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

which I’d intended to be a purely local health campaign was becoming dominated by me watching music, doing silly things and generally having fun. (Hey I’m really ill, why not live a little?)

The serious health articles I was also writing were getting squeezed out and so I decided they needed a home of their own, right here. No pictures, no silliness; just sensible reports and commentary on health issues.

Yet what I thought was an isolated event at one hospital now seems to be a general problem and so today I'm breaking my own rules.

At the end of October I had a Thrombosis – it’s a side effect of my medication and of my cancer. It wasn’t a surprise and I got myself off to my Accident and Emergency in good time, steering well clear of St. Peter’s.

I spent a long, hard day there, got a scan, an injection and a short briefing into the world of Anti coagulation. After a week of injections and doing well, I was moved onto warfarin tablets and to a routine nurse led clinic.

In fact, before I got there, the warfarin dose was far too high and it wasn’t monitored properly. The result was a sky high INR which didn’t come back down for a very long time. The long suffering nurses and phlebotomists were seeing me every couple of days, my arms looked like a junkies arms and I got really ill. It's also dangerous.

Near the end, waiting for a Doctor (first one for two and a half weeks), I lost it after a wait of five and a half hours in some pain. I told her what I thought of them all.

I refused a further blood test and left. Two days later more arguments. Now I’m being treated by my oncologist.

They made me really ill, made me worse than I needed to be and left me giving myself injections every day for 6 months – a reduced quality of life at the end of my life.

I’m too ill/tired/ground down to fight them over it.

What could I prove anyway? No one Doctor was dealing with me, it’s just that no one bothered. I’m sure the way I was dealt with fitted in with some plan or ‘pathway’, it’s just they got it wrong and then no one was interested enough to do anything about it until it was too late.

Meanwhile, a Sister was running everything at the clinic, slowly sinking under the weight of numbers, her life being made worse by me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone. I started picking up stories of unhappy, neglected patients all around me; angry and disappointed by the treatment they’d had, yet too frightened or timid to do anything.

I’ve had a lifelong commitment to the NHS; been doing the marches and pickets, the petitions and the protests. It’s not the NHS as it was meant to be; it’s an organisation of high salaries for a minority, big profits for private companies (and some Doctors making money) and a general lack of care amongst all Doctors. The rest are struggling on low pay and being treated badly. Not a good way to run a caring environment.

No one could say that the NHS of the 1950’s was great – the staff were generally the pre-war generation of very conservative, old fashioned and money grabbing Doctors and surgeons.

The ideals grew over time and they were at their peak, ironically, in the conservative 1980’s when the new post war generation of young Doctors had risen to levels of influence.

It’s been downhill ever since and is now so low in terms of commitment, morale and idealism that I despair. I am now frightened of being in hospital, just when I need them.

I’m really glad I did these Blogs, that I fought back. I only wish I’d done it sooner and had had enough time and strength to have done a better job of it.

Sadly, I won’t see how things work out although my fears of the future are such that I don’t know that I really want to be around to see it. I do know that the future will bring more privatisation, poorer working conditions for staff who are going to be paid less and treated even worse while a few fat cats are going to cream off as much money as they can get away with.

And how do you deal with frightened patients, too ill or worried to make a fuss?

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)
home: helpmesortoutthenhs.blogspot.com