Further fun with the NHS.
Vic was told to get to the hospital for about 9am on Friday. We got there a few minutes early. She was eventually given a bed at 8:40pm.Now, fair enough that there can be delays if you just turn up at A&E. But she didn't. She was sent to the hospital by her GP, and the pulmonory consultant said he was expecting her. Yet still.
Anyway, she didn't keep that bed for long. She's supposed to have a private room so that Daisy can visit her — Daisy, of course, can't hang around on a ward full of infections. But someone else needed the private room, so they shunted Vic out onto the main ward. Not only did this mean that she couldn't see her baby daughter, but also... well, bloody hell. Gary said the other day that, if he didn't know me, he'd swear I was making half this stuff up. I barely believe this one myself, and I was there.
They put Vic in the next bed from a woman due to have the same procedure as she is — having liquid drained out of her lungs, that is. And then they did it. Vic, her sister, and I sat there and listened to a doctor performing the lung-draining procedure on an old woman about six feet away, with a thin curtain hiding the view.
The sheer stupidity of this astounds me. Making sure that this never happens should be the most bog-standard of basic procedures. What if it goes wrong? What if the patient cries out in pain? What if they die, even if for unrelated reasons? How can you then go and perform the procedure on the next patient, who sat there and heard it all go wrong the last time?
These days, doctors are legally bound to tell you the risks and the worst-case scenario before doing anything to you. For understandable reasons, Vic is not comforted by reassurances that these worst-case scenarios are extremely rare, because, with the sole exception that she was lucky enough to have blood clots travel to her lungs instead of her heart, the worst-case scenarios keep happening to her. What should happen is that the doctor tells her the risks immediately prior to performing the procedure, giving her minimal time to spend dreading the worst. Instead, the doctor effectively told her all the risks on Saturday — or he told another patient while standing so close that we could only have avoided overhearing by rehearsing thrash metal — giving Vic at least two days, maybe three, to spend panicking. Nice one.
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