But of course.
It seems I may have been a little rash in mentioning the lack of medical incompetence in treating Vic's injury. Though Vic's treatment was indeed excellent, it now looks rather like the injury may have been caused by a medical fuck-up in the first place.Vic was at her Warfarin clinic on Tuesday, when the accident occurred, and her diabetic clinic today. Because she was going to be visiting the diabetic clinic, the staff at the Warfarin clinic decided to save everyone some time and Vic some discomfort by taking all the blood needed for both lots of blood tests. What with all the crap that happened over Winter, there are a lot of tests to be done. Today, at her diabetic clinic, Vic's consultant told her that she'd had nearly a pint taken. We suspect he's exaggerating, but the fact is that a hell of a lot more blood was taken than usual.
If you've ever given blood, you'll know that they take a pint out of you then make you lie down for fifteen minutes or so with biscuits and sugary drinks. If you just went skipping straight out the door after that sort of blood-loss, you'd shortly collapse. For diabetics, the same danger exists for much smaller amounts of bleeding — at the diabetic clinics, attendants hand out tea and coffee and biscuits to everyone in the waiting room, and that's usually just for one ampule of blood being taken. Plus, of course, for diabetics, the danger is greater: the blood-loss makes you dizzy anyway, but it can also lead to a hypoglycaemic attack, which makes you even dizzier and can lead to coma. Anaemics, too, have a lower tolerance: they take much longer to recover from giving blood than other people. And guess what one of the many afflictions to have hit Vic in the aftermath of the pregnancy was? Begins with "A", ends with "naemia".
The staff of the Warfarin clinic know about Vic's conditions, but did they stop her and get her to sit down for a bit after taking all this blood? Did they give her sugar? Did they even warn her how much blood they'd taken and perhaps advise her not to drive? Of course not. They just let her get straight back in her car and drive off with a baby. That's pretty bloody irresponsible, if you ask me. Luckily, probably because driving involves sitting, Vic was OK till she got home.
The reason we couldn't find the surface Vic had hit her head on was that, since it was on the back of her head, we'd thought she must have hit her head on some sort of overhang as she stood up, and then fainted from the concussion. We had no reason to suppose that she would have collapsed unprompted — had she collapsed from hypoglycaemia, she wouldn't have got up again. But now we know: she could have fainted from loss of blood, hitting her head on something on the way down, maybe even the floor. That would mean that her blood would have been on something low enough for the dogs to reach, and they'd happily have cleared it up.
So, the mystery's solved. And I'm rather angry.
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