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Ups and Downs from the NHS Ambulatory Care Service

Friday, December 15, 2023 5:59

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I have the flu. Not the flu where you cough a bit, take two days off work and then everything is fine with the world again, the flu where you wish for the sweet release of death and you can’t get out of bed for so long, even countless episodes of Star Trek start to get boring

This week has been particularly bad for me for the following reasons:

1) I’m a man, and Man flu is so much worse than the regular version

2) I’m a wuss

3) The NHS

If you’ve read a bit of my blog in the past, you probably know I have nothing but scorn for the NHS. You also should know that my ire is directed at the system, the management, the waste, and not the people you actually meet when you need treatment (And before any lefties start with their lefty logic, yes, if I need treatment, I will get it. Allow me to opt out and I will)

I do still have some niggles with the frontline staff though (Tik Tok videos during Covid aside for the moment). Eveything takes so long and they are never honest about how long things are going to take. They also seem to have a lack of communication, which makes things take even longer

I had the proper bad flu a few times in my early twenties for some reason. This was back before man flu was properly diagnosed. It always started with chronic back pain, then a few hours later, all the symptoms would have kicked in and I would be circling the drain. This would last about a week before I recovered and I remember it happening to me on four different occasions

It’s been twenty three years since I’ve had it though, so when the back pain started as I was leaving work on Monday, I hoped I was dying of something a little more mundane. No other symptoms appeared in the evening, so when I took a handful of painkillers and went to bed at nine, I asumed I was correct

I woke up in the night though, sweating like a Kennedy at a gun show. I have never sweated so much in my life. Even when I was in Corfu in August and decided I would be fine in jeans, I didn’t loose this much water. My pulse rate was also in the 120′s, so I was concerned I might have a kidney infection and rang the doctors in the morning

I could tell the doctors were also concerned, as when I asked for an aoppointment, they seemed a little put out, as giving people doctors appointments really isn’t what they are there for, but after I described my symptoms, they invited me in at 11:00, which barely gave me time to throw up and put some pants on

The doc asked a lot of questions, did all the usual tests and then had me pee in a cup so he could dunk a lolly stick in it. He quickly ruled out kidney infection, but he was still convinced it was an infection of some description, so he referred me to the ambulatory care place at the hospital for further tests

He gave me a printed sheet with all his findings on it, to hand in at the hospital and I went straight there. It was only an hours wait to see a nurse, but she did all the same tests and asked all the same questions again. She then took blood samples and told me it would be a hour before the results came back. When I told her I would therefore be back in an hour, she told me to wait as the doctor may want to see me in the meantime

Two hours later I overheard a woman complaining that her blood results hadn’t come back yet. The conversation went like this

Woman: My results are not back

Nurse: Yes it may take up to an hour

Woman: It’s been an hour

Nurse: Yes, it may take one to two hours

After three and a half hours, the pain in my back was going nuts, so I took the two paracetamols that I had brought with me. Ten minutes after that, the doc summoned me

She asked all the same questions and did all the same tests again. She was also a talker, and quite a rapid one. Fortunately the words, ‘Kid, take a breath, you’re rambling on and making no sense’, stayed in my head and didn’t leave my mouth

She told me the blood tests showed I had a low white blood cell count, which may or may not mean I’m fighting an infection. I’m sometimes over-awed by modern medicine

The next step, she told me, was to have an x-ray. At this point I just wanted to go home and die on my own couch, so I asked her, as they were certain it was an infection, why can’t they just give me a course of decent anti-biotics and send me away, but she said they have to know exactly what it is before they will prescribe anything

However, she was kind enough to offer me some industrial strength pain killers after I told her my crappy Tesco paracetamols weren’t even numbing the pain of this conversation. “I’ll go get some!”, she happily announced, before skipping out of the room, whistling A Spoonful of Sugar

Twenty minutes later, a nurse came in, asked me my name and then said she’d been asked to get me some super duty painkillers. She couldn’t do it right away however, as she had to get them from another department and needed to wait for her colleague to return from her break. “Won’t be long though!”

Forty minutes later, another nurse came in and said she had been asked to get me my arse kickers, and she was going to do it now. At this point I remembered that I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and asked if this would be a problem. This nurse came back five minutes later with a tuna sandwich, some coffee and a couple of tiny little pills that made the whole days experience a little more worth while.

Then she wanted more blood. This was for ‘cultures’. Something about growing a clone and seeing if that gets sick. Or something. So after draining me a bit more, she then sent me off to get the x-ray

I took this opportunity to leave the hospital for a short break though. Mrs Bucko was in bed when I left the house as she was working nights. She had been trying to contact me when she got up, but there was no signal in the building so I went out to phone her with an update from the area where all the smokers go

After another hours wait, the x-raying person sommoned me, gave me a blue dress and told me to change in a little room, then buggered off. Do I leave all my things in this room? Do I take my underpants off? Where was I supposed to go?

After she found me wandering the corridors in my frock, she collected me and took me to the x-ray bunker, zapped me and told me to report back to the ambulatory place again. I changed out of my dress first, as I just assumed…

Back at the ambulatory care ward, I managed to scrounge another coffee, then settled in to watch The Chase and wait for another doctor. This one was the closest thing to an ageing hippy I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Groovy man

He asked me all the same questions and did all the usual tests (How many times can you have your blood pressure taken before your arm falls off?). And then he concluded that it wasn’t an infection, but a virus. I have the flu. The virus is causing inflamation at the base of my spine, hence the pain

He gave me (No prescription I had to pay for, just here you go) a box of hard drugs and said to take these for the pain until the virus clears up in a few days

But it’s not over yet. He wanted to do one last test. An MRI scan. After a little questioning, it turns out that with all these tests, they were actually looking for something specific. It’s apparently a rare situation where you get an infection in the discs of your spine. It’s imaginatively called ‘Diskitis’ and apparently it’s a little bitch to treat. Six to eight weeks on an antibiotic drip, he tells me, and although they are now convinced it’s not that, there’s no harm in having that last test done

And I agreed. As inconvenient as it all is, I don’t really mind having random tests done every now and then. I’m almost 50, so that’s like 100k miles on the clock and the age where things can start to go wrong, so whatever. The MRI is booked for tomorrow at 11:30. What is the betting that it actually happens at 11:30? I’m going to take a book

Anyway, I got home that evening, ate some food and took a couple of these pills. With the drugs, I actually managed to enjoy a relaxing evening. I took two more later and got an early night

I then woke up at two thirty in the bastarding morning with the worst sore throat ever. So painful I couldn’t even swallow. It was like my body was taking the piss out of me. Painkillers that work, but you have to take them after food? No more eating for you, looser!

By the morning I was at grown man crying point. I managed to work my way up from sucking a couple of halls soothers, to drinking a brew, to forcing down some yoghurt, before finally gobbing the drugs. Yesterday it was eat, drugs, sleep, eat, drugs, sleep, every four hours

I managed to sleep ok last night and the sore throat is now manageable. The pain has also gone down considerably. I’ve not yet bothered with the drugs and I’m going to hold off to see if I’m actually getting better. Mrs Bucko is still in bed at the moment, but when she gets up, I’m sure she will be pleased to find I’m out of the ‘whining like a little girl’ phase of my illness, and on to the ‘please will you do me a brew’ phase

Tomorrow I’m hoping to be well enough to have moved onto the ‘will you get from under my fucking feet and find something to do’ phase. She likes that one

Source: http://fuelinjectedmoose.blogspot.com/2023/12/ups-and-downs-from-nhs-ambulatory-care.html

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