baroque_mongoose

The quote is from a song by Instant Sunshine, a rather fun quartet who are (or were; I'm not sure if they're still going) mostly doctors. They did a number of amusing songs, some of which were inevitably about the medical profession, and this particular quote involved a play on the double meaning of the word "practise".

Well... doctors, and indeed a whole cohort of other medical staff, saved my life back in 2016, and I am and remain very grateful for that. I had acute bowel ischaemia in two places, which in lay parlance means that two separate sections of my gut had simply died, plus a side order of full-body sepsis. Even with emergency surgery, which I had, my chances of survival were in single figures. That was one heck of a CON roll I made there; natural 20, I reckon. More seriously, there was also a great deal of prayer going on, since I had a strong sense (even through all the hallucinations) that I wasn't really meant to go just yet. And indeed it turned out that I wasn't.

Fast forward not even quite ten years, and my poor old mother (who is 87, and as of the past couple of months completely bed-bound) is still alive, but after the last three or four days that's also some kind of miracle. She's been the victim of a whole cascade of medical mishaps and outright blunders. The NHS staff haven't changed; they're still amazing people who regularly go above and beyond for the sake of their patients. But they're now under so much strain that mistakes are pretty much inevitable.

It all kicked off on Wednesday. Mum is now living at my sister's house, in a hospital bed with an airflow mattress, because she's so frail she can't so much as roll over on her own. She has carers in three times a day to do the required nursing duties, which is a great help to my sister, who's feeding her and doing all the other non-nursing stuff. One of the carers accidentally knocked Mum's gall bladder drain out, which she's had in since about the middle of October following the severe gall bladder infection which was the thing that knocked her off her feet in the first place. So my sister ended up batting between the district nurses and the GP to try to get this thing put back in (and at least have a proper dressing put on the area in the meantime). Finally, it turned out she'd have to be seen in hospital.

My sister's house does not have any step-free access, which is awkward even for me; there are grab rails at the front, so I can get in through the front door with a little care, but the room Mum is in has patio doors and there's a 20 cm step there. So it turned out that a Special Moving Device, the name of which I forget, had to be used to get her from her bed to the ambulance, and the ambulance crew advised my sister to tell the hospital that one of these things would also be needed to put her back when she returned.

The hospital was ram-jam, as they always are these days, because some stupid politicians decided that unoccupied hospital beds were a waste. (No, they're not; they're the only sensible way to deal with fluctuations in patient numbers.) Hospitals now permanently run at full capacity, or a bit over; and in this case it was a bit over, so there were patients in A&E waiting to be moved onto wards, so A&E was full up, and Mum had to wait three hours to be seen. The doctor saw her, decided the drain was fine to come out permanently now, changed her dressing, and... then couldn't send her home, because it was now after 5 pm, and due to budget cuts they were now not allowed to arrange patient transport for after that time.

So she had to spend the night in hospital, on a trolley. They did at least find a corner in a ward for her, so she wasn't in a corridor somewhere.

The next day was entirely taken up trying to find a free ambulance with one of these Special Moving Devices, and failing... until, again, after 5 pm. So, rinse and repeat. I trust at least someone fed her.

Finally they got her back to my sister's on Friday; by this point she was at a very low ebb, absolutely exhausted, and... of course she'd been off her airflow mattress for a couple of nights. So she has really nasty bed sores. Plus it turned out the hospital had lost the medication my sister had brought in for her, and two different sections were blaming each other for that, so the medication then had to be re-prescribed as an emergency and even that didn't go smoothly. My poor sister ended up cracking open a bottle of beer and ranting, at great length, over the phone to her MP's secretary. (The MP, at any rate, is great, but there's only so much he can do on his own... having said that, he absolutely does it.)

Anyway. Mum is still alive after all that. Whether she'll make it to Christmas is anyone's guess, to be quite honest; but she's still here for now, no thanks to all the bungles.

My sister is planning to complain. In quadruplicate.

Today has been... a bit of a day. I had lunch with some very dear friends who have been on the wrong end of, let's say, a situation; it was one of those situations where nobody actually deliberately did anything wrong, but quite a few people who should have known better were extremely clumsy and hurt people, and should really have apologised for that at the time and then gone on to learn from their mistakes so they didn't make the same ones again. Dealing with people who have been through trauma is not easy; it requires a great deal of care and wisdom, and in particular it requires listening. There is always a danger of accidentally retraumatising someone, because you don't know where the triggers are. That is why it is of the utmost importance to keep checking in with them and then listening carefully to the answers they give you. That, as far as I'm concerned, is basic... and nonetheless a number of people failed to do it. There were a number of other ramifications as well, several of them connected with my friends' autistic toddler (who is, incidentally, an Awesome Little Dude and nobody is going to tell me any different), but that lack of listening and seeking feedback was the nub of it. I knew there was a major problem going on, but today, for the first time, they went into full detail about it and it was a great deal worse than I'd thought.

And then there's my mother. She's 87 and she was admitted to hospital a little over three weeks ago with a serious gall-bladder infection. Had she been younger and fitter, they'd have just had her gall-bladder out, but she probably wouldn't have survived the anaesthetic, as she is quite frail. So instead they filled her full of antibiotics, which cured the infection, but... even though she's technically medically stable now, she's not in a good way. She is having serious difficulty eating and drinking, her blood pressure's so low she can't stand up, and she's been hallucinating (though at least she does know she's hallucinating; it is really frightening when you don't, believe me - I went through that when I nearly died in 2016). She and one of my sisters both live in the same town, which is where I was born, but although there is a hospital there, it doesn't have overnight beds for some reason; so she's currently over 30 km away, and my sister's been commuting back and forth every day except Sunday (when she can't for other reasons). So what is now about to happen is that she's going to be discharged to my sister's house; she and her husband have done some reorganisation so that Mum can have a room downstairs, and they've set up a hospital bed in it. And obviously I am quite anxious to get up there while she's still in a fit state to recognise me, because we're not sure she's even going to make it to Christmas. That would be fine if I drove, or at the very least could walk about normally and therefore use the trains, but negotiating train changes in a wheelchair is a bit of a lottery to say the very least, and there is no direct train from anywhere near where I am. The problem with disability assistance on the railways is that it's either brilliant or not there at all, and you don't know which it's going to be.

So. We shall have to see what happens. At the moment I'm investigating possible ways of getting up there by taxi/car (the whole journey by taxi would be horribly expensive, but I may be able to get a taxi as far as my other sister's house, if she's able to get up there herself); but right now it's all a bit fraught.

And I have still not heard anything back from the drama group, but that is rather the last thing on my mind right now.