Since the capitulation of the entire medical establishment to COVID, I have tried to keep my distance from my old profession. It’s not that hard, because GP medication checks are a thing of the past, and I avoid today’s regular vaccinations, having read the literature. The most I’ve required has been a shoulder injection for a rotator-cuff syndrome, which worked very well
But over the last year I developed a problem which, whilst not life-threatening, was becoming increasingly inconvenient. In mid-September I eventually contacted my own surgery, and through the wonders of Mr Bell’s telephonic invention was able to speak to my own GP. To be fair, had he not been aware of my GP experience, he would probably have wanted to examine me himself. But as it was, he consulted his Referral Protocol Runes, which directed him to order an ultrasound and refer according to the results. When I asked about appointment times (the problem being annoying enough to sell my house and go private if necessary) he replied, “We talk about more or less than a year nowadays,” but we agreed to see what priority actually emerged under the NHS.
To my surprise, a scan appointment came for a Saturday within a fortnight, at Exeter’s Nightingale Hospital, a white elephant of a place with long deserted corridors and the occasional door to a clinic. The scan being benign (as the sonographer showed me, I think without knowledge of my profession), I was reassured, and my GP quickly e-mailed me to say the referral had gone off.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t had my BP checked since doctors stopped seeing me, and it would be a bummer if it turned out high, postponed surgery and, to boot, got me on the medication bandwagon. So I fished out my old aneroid sphygmomanometer with a rather perished cuff after all these years of retirement, and found the reading alarmingly high. So I ordered a new sphyg from Amazon, whilst thinking about dietary changes that might help.
Amazingly, even before Amazon’s next-day delivery, a surgical appointment arrived for the following week (at Ottery St Mary). That caused my hypertension panic to increase, until the machine arrived and showed that 50 year old aneroid sphygs with rubber cuffs over-read, and my BP was actually “wonderful for me age.” That’s what comes of managing a couple of acres of meadow and woodland. The appointment went routinely, and the doctor intimated that, the stars being aligned, waiting times were quite good, and I should be done before Christmas.
In fact the appointment for my pre-op assessment came for the following week (at another hospital in Exeter), which had the bonus that the blood-taking nurse, asking where I lived, said her son was just over the valley, married to a podiatrist, for whom she gave me a card for my wife’s troublesome toenail.
The operation itself was then scheduled for the very next week (yesterday in fact, at Tiverton – you get to see the world as a surgery patient), and I was out of my general anaesthetic by 11.30 am and home at a quarter to three, virtually pain-free and ready for supper. My old-school consultant anaesthetist turned out to have done his house job in Poole under the same consultant I did one of mine, I discovered as I went under.
So, it has been around six weeks from contacting GP to surgery, with friendly and mainly native English staff throughout, and clean and pleasant surroundings as well as, as far as I can tell so far, top-class treatment. When the NHS works it can work very well – much of which, of course, boils down to competent and motivated staff.
Would that that was so throughout the system – a friend tells of her husband in for cardiac problems discovering, through a medical visitor, that “Do Not Resuscitate” had been entered in the notes with zero consultation. When the patient, forcefully, instructed the next doctor he saw to erase it, the reply was, “Are you sure.” Another tells of a man with a rapidly deteriorating life-threatening condition having to wait for six weeks for an investigation – my own entire journey time – and ending up in very poor condition for major surgery. And of course, one cannot forget the inexcusable professional group-think documented by Dr David Cartland, nor the bureacratic nonsense and waste over transgenderism and DIE.
But I am hugely grateful to say that I got an excellent deal from the NHS this time, and I’m certainly not the only one. Of course, I must give thanks the enveloping care of God’s grace, above all. And apart from diesel consumption and the price of a home BP monitor, the only cost to me was £7 for parking at the main hospital in Exeter. We’ll just have to see what comes of the abnormal ECG findings that turned up at my pre-op…
