It’s a tricky one right now, writing about the NHS. The Tories fucked it so hard in COVID it’ll be forever to even slightly get it back to what it was. The coming refogres belong to America and we might lose this wonder of a healthcare system. It has been propped up by good people, but they are so tired now. Anyone who still works for the NHS and keeps it rolling is a brilliant human being and deserves to be celebrated. Even if they behave like a total dick.
I’m still gonna write my blog, which is about my day, which is mostly about Lou and I going to the A&E at Brighton Hospital, and the fun we had therein.
Lou has an old injury that may or may not have been compounded recently. There’s an old break. I’m not gonna go into too much detail, but we all have this stuff if we are still alive. Certain bits of ourselves that we have had history with. Knees or backs or toes or fingers or whatever. One of Lou’s big trigger areas had a massive accidental hit to it. Genuine proper hard, some people would have quit their job right then, others would genuinely have sued. She was in agony. And she pushed through it for two days because self employed etc etc and she cares.
I know this well. I broke a rib and then played Banquo twice at the Willow Globe. One show, Maz slapped me on the back in a “hail fellow well met” type embrace, and my scream could probably have been heard in Cardiff. When I eventually went to A&E just to do due diligence and check my broken rib wasn’t puncturing a lung, I wandered in insouciant. “I’m not using painkillers right now to help diagnosis but it hurts and I’d like some please. I broke my rib three days ago. Since then I’ve done two Shakespeare plays and driven myself back to London.”
I sat 4 hours before getting triage and watched loads of people come in, go through multiple stages, leave. Eventually I kicked off and thankfully a doctor was there. She ran some quick pokey diagnostics. “Does it hurt if I poke this rib?” “Not really, but don’t poke the one below it.” “This one” “FUCK YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FUCKING WHAT THE FUCK?” “How’s about this one?” “That’s fine but don’t touch the other one again” “This one” “I WILL FUCKING PUNCH YOU!” “Get him straight into X-ray please. He’s been here far too long.”
That doctor told me when we got my x-rays: “You were in pain. Your rib was actually really badly broken. You should be in agony. We only have how you present yourself to go by. If you aren’t screaming bloody murder like you did when I poked it, we can’t trust that there’s anything actually wrong with you. Your presentation is the first diagnostic we have. We had you marked as a minor injury so we prioritised everyone who presented harder than you.”
Lou is stoic. I was parking. She got put on the minor list. And so we sat there for hours.
I tried to talk to the nurses and … fucking hell. I sound posh and I’m male. I’ve never felt quite so unwelcome. I’m doing the talking as Lou can’t walk easily to get to them. The receptionist, when I suggest she has perhaps underpresented her pain: “We don’t make the clinical decisions. If she’s been deprioritised it’s because of the assessment of the clinical team.” So we sit there watching people with an owie finger come in and get seen immediately. And I go back to the receptionist. And she says like it’s advice: “Go ask someone from the clinical team.” So she’s said it so I reckon it must be a thing I can do even though they’re busy.
So I ask one of the triage nurses: “are you from the clinical team?” And rather than say yes or no she immediately looks defensive and her shrug says “who gave you that language?” And I say “I’m just trying to find someone from the clinical team as I think my girlfriend might have been deprioritised”. And her response is an attack like I’m being an absolute arse, where I’m really trying to be regulated and sound reasonable. She takes Lous name, looks on a screen, gives me no information, “She’s in process.” “Is there any reason why her process is slower than everyone else’s?” “She’s in process.”
I go back to Lou. She’s really aware how deprioritised she is now. We see so many people get bumped ahead of her it is hard not to be really disillusioned. This horribly sad crowded room, and all these people who are professionally sick coming in cos they’ve hit their elbow and getting inexplicably bumped up coz they play the system and we just sit there and watch them all come and go. And eventually there’s a young woman right by us who has literally just come in and Lou is really upset by now and the nurse calls the young woman’s name and I look to see who it is and who knows but they don’t seem as bad as Lou, and I involuntarily say “oh for fuck’s sake” and the nurse hears me cos she’s walked into the room and is right by me, she’s not in the door anymore. It … just comes out of me because I’m so upset about how obvious it is that Lou has been pushed down the list simply because she’s not howling like the child that didn’t get the candyfloss.
So then I have to have a talk with the nurse about why I expressed my frustration. And I don’t want to rock the boat, I’m just trying to support Lou. Nursey makes me eat shit l even though I wasn’t actually trying to defy her. There have been plenty of times in my life when I’ve said something unpleasant pitched to be heard. In this instance it isn’t pointed – I’m genuinely upset. Nursey thinks I’m targeting her though so then I can’t do or say anything that makes it better as she has already characterised me as a difficult person. In fact any attempt to get info from anyone about why it is so slow for Lou elicits a similar reaction of worldweary contempt from our beleaguered nurses, all of them. Cuz I’m trying to get her off the minor injury list. Lou gets angry. “You’ve been taught to sound authoritative and they react to the tone.” Perhaps.
You know what though, that one nurse: she was horrible to me and Lou in a way that can only have been based on her idea of who we were.
Maybe posh boy trying to help Lou get seen made it worse but honestly, that horrid woman – she’s at the end of her tether. Her time trying to hold to the light in this underfunded underpaid wonderful free system – it has bent her out of shape. The stress has made her nasty. It’s upsetting. Because it didn’t have to end like that for her and it isn’t her fault that it did.
“What’s the problem?” “We’ve sat here and watched you overlook Lou for triage again and again.” “It’s because she only has a minor injury” “And how do you know that without triage?”
When Lou is finally called, the same bitch nurse loudly announces to the brilliant nurse who has called her name, and to the whole room : “This lady wants to complain about her waiting time being too long,” to which Lou immediately and honestly says in her quiet way “No I don’t. I really don’t. I just want someone to see me please, can someone just please see me?”
And the lovely bespectacled nurse who isn’t a broken human (yet? More funding please) makes it happen and from thence all is well. She ignores the nasty one, who – not satisfied with deprioritising Lou for not crying wolf – tried to send negative energy after her with her announcement like the fancylady desires to make a complaint about her service. Horrid. Really horrid. And a shame.
We all find out how people can twist in care jobs. It sometimes goes very very wrong. The woman we met isn’t there yet, but the bell is tolling for her. But everyone we lose from the NHS, because they jump like some of my friends or because their soul dies like the lady today – that’s a loss to everyone.
This is a bit of a word dump, but … health is really emotional. Historic injuries are triggering. We shouldn’t be forced to squeal like children when we have a potentially career threatening problem. People with high pain thresholds should not be punished.
Nurses don’t take the Hippocratic Oath.
God bless the NHS. Those poor people must be so strung out. It is so important and central to all of our lives in this country. It is a fantastic system and makes our society so much better. But the people in it have stayed there because they were idealists. And they’ve been undervalued. And their contribution has been overlooked. And they’ve got bitter. And like with acting, when you get bitter that’s when you know its time to quit.
AlBarclay 