Gemcitibane day today, which is the easiest chemo day to cope with to be honest. Saying that, the bureaucracy of just getting in, getting bloods drawn, getting to see the consultant and then getting the chemo infused is more than a little frustrating. Gemcitibane is a 1 hour treatment if you include the fifteen minute saline solutions either side. The whole process took from 1pm to 7pm and that didn't include driving time to and from the hospital.
I don't know about other patients, but for me I just want to get in and get on with it. Anything else just seems to be waste of time. My marvellous NHS seems to run on a system that defies rhyme or reason, it simply does what it wants to. The people who work at the Chrisite hospital are marvelous, the environment is okay, the systems are just so slow they make you want to scream.
I had a good chat about this today with Dr Aziz and he was actually quite sympathetic to my cause. See, I knew that I was being fitted in to the system as I am on my fourth episode of teratoma which is unusual in itself and there are no clinics in existence to cope with me. Accordingly, I was attached to a breast cancer clinic as that could accommodate me for treatment. Unfortunately I couldn't accommodate it as I have been getting home some nights at 10pm and later which is no good when you have school aged children and no-one in the family who can look after them and feed them at tea time. The good Dr Aziz has agreed to move my clinic and treatment day to a Friday as I will start my treatment earlier in the day with a view to getting home at something closer to a reasonable time.
This seems like a petty detail really, especially when you are getting potentially life saving or life increasing treatments but, even cancer patients have lives too you know and we get frustrated just like everyone else when a few hours at the hospital turns into a day long test of nerves.
Just because you have a life threatening illness doesn't mean you don't have a life and it doesn't mean that you are so grateful for treatment that you accept being left to hang around a hospital for hours on end because that's the way it all works. I wonder if any of the people responsible for designing the admissions and treatment systems at the Christie hospital have actually ever had cancer? The designers probably think it all works swimmingly.
Maybe the next time I'm at lunch with Gordon Brown we'll have a chat about the NHS and the services it delivers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
LOL
Keep up the good fight Iain. You are still getting the good vibes sent to you from across the pond. Course, I have trouble with time zones, so if you feel a tingle in the middle of the night, it might just be me!
MuN
Post a Comment