What I saw in hospital

Mother in law is in hospital, admitted over a week ago for a blood pressure reading so much off the scale that the first doctor thought his machine had broken, we had really taken her in to have a suspcted fracture investigated. 4 days later a fracture in a bone in the wrist was reported along with the statement that they 'wouldn't be doing anything with it as it appears not to hurt her'. Meanwhile we waited 6 days for a 24hr heart monitor which we were told on admission would be required. On Saturday came the news that the heart test was fine but they couldn't do any other tests now because of the Bank Holiday, the doctor would probably order some more on his return on Tuesday. If pat experience tels us anything then it will be Friday before these tests are carried out. By then MIL will have been 'in' 2 whole weeks. No wonder they are short of beds. The whole NHS process grinds slowly on with no sense of urgency or even regard for the patient's well being. We have ben concerned about her lack of eating and drinking. No-one encourages her to do either outside of the family who have devised a rota to ensure there is someone present at the evening meal time. the main meal of that day is at lunchtime and visiting is not allowed. Daily she reports she 'ate nothing/ didn't like it/couldn't be bothered' or even on a couple of occassions 'didn't get any pudding/they forgot me/I didn't have a fork'. Add this catalogue to the day I discovered a jug of water out of arm's reach and no glass no wonder this lady is losing weight and de-hydrated.

A request to the ward sister to monitor her eating and drinking as we felt this to be a problem resulted in a lovely record sheet being pinned to the bottom of the bed first thing in the morning. There were columns for description of food/drink, amount given, amount eaten and overall comments. Trouble is at 5pm the whole sheet was blank, no one had bothered to use it.

If the NHS were school project the marks would be as follows:

Knowledge: 5/10

Interest in subject: 1/10

Effort: 0/10

Some interesting ideas were put forward at the outset but the project failed to follow through and almost no written work was submitted for evaluation. Must try much harder.

OK, I joke but this is an elderly lady's life at stake here and from where I sit no one is very interested at all.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Image courtesy of beatlefans.com

I'm home, a day late but anyway I'm here now and well on the road to recovery. I was looked after wonderfully well in the hospital apart from an unfortunate experience where I was given far too much morphine than was good for me for some reason.

It's still a bit in my system so I'll leave the details and description until a later date. I will say it's not something I want to repeat any time but it has give WH a conversation piece with all the plasterers/painters/roofers working on the new house during his brief visits to supervise. I thought my ears were burning and if I listen hard enough I can hear the laughter from here. Seemingly I would have made a good comedy duo, single handed.