I’m outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Horrid places, hospitals. I’m in A&E with my neighbour. She’s finally gone in after falling four weeks ago. Tough old boot, she’s got multiple fractures and her shoulder has been dislocated for a month. That’s gonna hurt. I have a feeling that as I write some burly fellow is about to CRONCH the whole damn thing back into the socket.
An old guy with a huge beard is being very noisily sick into a cardboard bucket. A baby is howling on constant repeat with all that it has. Some people hobble, some are masked. Some have company. Most are alone. There’s a surprising amount of French being spoken in here. Chelsea and Westminster. Near the Lycee.
The doctors are on strike, and still we have been here just two and a half hours and she’s had triage, an x-ray, a discussion of the results and now she’s with “another doctor”. She won’t pay a penny. Considering we are in the middle of another one of these necessary strikes, that’s so impressive.
The nurses are evidently knackered and running on fumes. People are wired. But there’s so much humanity here. Bloody eyes and broken bones and coughs and puke and neurosis and pain. I want food. I’m hoping this is it for the day and I can drive her home. Maybe we will go via lunch…
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Damn. That’s a brilliant young doctor. 28. He’s sent her for a CT scan. She’s got loads of fractures all round the upper arm that have half healed badly. He needs to work out if it’s worth getting her into a sling now. She’s “too old” for them to operate, and he dismissed the idea of rebreaking it all. After the scan, he said we might as well get some lunch rather than wait for immediate results. Reading between the lines I think that means we are gonna be here for hours yet. Still, CT scan coming up. It’s all very clean here in the scan waiting room, and nobody is screaming or puking. Everyone is just in pain. We’ve only been here 3 hours so far.
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I went for lunch. It was heavily implied that we would have time to do so while waiting for CT scan result so I figured there was time. Now we are waiting for a nurse to put the sling on. 4.5 hours.
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Just 5 hours. A nurse for triage. An x-ray. A doctor to explain it. A CT scan. A doctor to further explain it and allay fears. A nurse to fit a sling and explain it. Plus the sling of course. An appointment at the fracture clinic this Sunday. I was bored out my tree but… in the US this would be pricey. God damn those fucking plastic idiots trying to mirror US healthcare for their own nasty profit. Thank the lord that for now, because of the hearts that are still in it, the NHS machine is limping towards the next election. Just. Bless them in their strike action, without which this would have been much quicker. I really really hope their desperation will cause even these venal humans to make some changes. Honestly, I’ve never felt more like we need a revolution. Problem with revolution is that it all just starts again immediately with different faces.
AlBarclay 