Community: Real Life

National health disaster


Alex

Alex is about to go back to university to get a degree in Building Engineering so he can further his cause of becoming powerful and ultimately taking over the world. He spends his days caring for his nan, playing ball and going to the gym.

Alex hates the National Health Service because he thinks his nan hasn't been given the care she needs just because of her age. He also pleads with doctors to brush up on their bedside manners.

Does the state of our National Health Service piss you off? I used to want to be a doctor and I used to have respect for the medical profession, but that's in the past after seeing how my Nan has been treated over the past year-and-a-half.

My Nan has been smoking a pack a day for over 30 years, she's been on anti-depressants since 1974 and she's never eaten properly in her life. Last year I had to call an ambulance to take her to casualty as she was having severe breathing difficulties. Two days later she was discharged with the following advice; stop smoking, get on a diet, and take this medication. At the time I took her into hospital, she was already taking pills for an under-active thyroid, high blood pressure and fluid retention in her legs. When she was released she was given an inhaler, aspirin and various other pills. The doctors felt the problem may lie with her heart so they scheduled her in for a set of tests, including an electrocardiogram (ECG) which records the electrical voltage in the heart. She was then told she would be having an Echocardiogram shortly after to get an ultrasound of her heart, but this took an agonising seven months to happen.

Three months down the line and there was no word from the hospital. Her withdrawal symptoms were so bad that she started smoking again and it seemed she would never be right again. Eight months later I had to take her to hospital when she had a panic attack and complained of strong stomach pains. I watched as my Nan cried out from the pain, yet she was discharged within two hours and told to take some stomach pills in view of having more tests.

Two weeks later she went into hospital to have an endoscopy to see if there were any serious problems inside her stomach. Around the same time, my Nan started to act really weird and have hallucinations. Great, that's all I needed. I took her to see a doctor after the endoscopy and he prescribed some antibiotics to kill the bacteria they'd found in her stomach. He was very rude and my Nan decided straight away that he wasn't trustworthy. I picked her medication up from the pharmacy but as soon as my Nan took one she threw them away and complained that I was trying to kill her. I was convinced that my Nan was having some serious mental issues and that the anti-depressants weren't doing their job in the slightest, but no one would listen to me.

"I despise the NHS and everything it stands for. I feel helpless and I have to watch her suffer which is killing me bit by bit every day."

My Nan is still not feeling any better and I feel like I'm about to break down myself because I've taken her to so many appointments and tests. I know my Nan needs to be hospitalised and put on regular medication, but there are no beds at the psychiatric wards, and even if there were some, these wards won't accept people over 65.  So she's stuck with home visits from nurses and doctors who are just experimenting on her with different pills. It's driving me nuts. It's been almost a year and a half since her initial hospitalisation and nothing's been resolved; they still can't tell me what's wrong with her and they keep saying it's because she's old. Now she has a further four week wait for a barium enema to look at her stomach.

She can't live like this. She keeps telling me she will kill herself because she can't take it any more. I can't take it any more. I despise the NHS and everything it stands for. I feel helpless and I have to watch her suffer which is killing me bit by bit every day. Good thing I am strong, otherwise I would have been in a white room with no windows a long time ago.

What happened to doctors who are willing to help people? These days it's all about cost-cutting and deadlines. The A&E unit has a four-hour watershed, which means that they have to "process" you within four hours of admission. So if you are waiting any later than that, they send you home and tell you that "they don't think your symptoms are serious enough to warrant a stay in the hospital, therefore you are discharged."

My Nan has been treated like a piece of shit and I hope that I never get ill and have to go through what she's had to go through. Whoever named it the 'National Health Service' is an idiot, providing health shouldn't be a service, it should be a duty bound by the 'Hippocratic Oath'. But hey, I guess no one gives a shit about that anymore, do they?

Angry? Submit a rant


Bookmark with:What are these?

Also on TheSite.org