Say Anything Blog

From The Independent:

The NHS is the National Health Service, the massively socialized healthcare system of Great Britain.

Patricia Balsom: Diary of my final days

How one cancer patient suffered at the hands of the NHS

Like most people, Janet Street-Porter had read about the problems engulfing the National Health Service. But it wasn’t until her sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer that she came face to face with the stark reality of our debt-ridden hospitals. And it is all spelt out in the diary that Patricia Balsom has kept as she seeks the care she so desperately needs

Wednesday 25 October

It’s eight months since I collapsed and was taken to hospital, where I was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer. Because of my age - 57 - I was told that very little could be done for me, and that I had up to six months left to live. I then discovered that because of the cash crisis in the NHS, treatment is rationed to those who are most likely to recover, and if you suffer from more than one form of cancer, you don’t fall into that category. It’s particularly the case at the primary care trust that I come under - Hillingdon in west London - which has one of the biggest deficits in the country. Thanks to my sister, I was able to go private and received gamma knife treatment on my brain at the Cromwell Hospital in London at a cost of £15,000. It was after this that the NHS offered me a course of radiotherapy on my lungs, which I had in July. In September, an MRI scan showed that the cancer in my brain was in remission, and I was then offered a bone scan by the NHS to see if the lung cancer had spread further. Two weeks ago I had a pain under my ribs, and my oncologist thought I had either cracked a rib or that the cancer might have spread to one of my bones. I had an X-ray on 12 October but had to wait two weeks for the bone scan at Hillingdon Hospital even though I was in pain. I felt sick on the morning of the appointment, when Mick (my husband) took me to the hospital by car. Once inside the foyer I felt faint, but luckily an ambulance man put me in a wheelchair and took me to A&E where I was checked over and put in the observation ward. That evening I was transferred to a ward. I was breathing with the help of oxygen.

Friday 27 October

I was seen by doctors who slightly changed my medication and told me I could go home on Monday, once a specialist nurse had sorted out what I’d need at home - a hospital bed, a commode, and an oxygen machine. I was told that a carer from an agency would come in every day and help us. No one mentioned whether I would ever get a bone scan. No one explained what we could ask the carer to do and how long we could ask them to work for. The four-bedded wards at Hillingdon on my ward are mixed (men and women), and on Saturday night I was woken up twice by the man opposite. He was standing stark naked at the end of his bed masturbating.

Sunday 29 October

An elderly lady was placed in her bed next to a hot radiator to sleep, but as her bed only had one protective side on it, if she’d fallen out she would have burnt herself. When I mentioned this to a nurse they eventually moved her next to a wall. That evening at visiting time, Mick and I noticed that my left leg had became extremely swollen. We told a nurse, who telephoned for a doctor to come and see me at 8.30pm. At 2am I still hadn’t been seen. By now I was crying and extremely distressed. They had already told me I had blood clots on my lung and now I was worried they might be in my leg. A nurse tried to tell me that the doctor might have come while I was asleep. At 2.30am I was so upset that I called Mick at home. Eventually a doctor came to see me while he was visiting another patient, and said he thought the swelling was caused by a blood clot. I was really frightened.

Read the whole thing, if you have a strong stomach.

This is our healthcare future if we go to a massive, all-inclusive socialized system. The promised “savings"(for some) are vastly outweighed by the lack of incentive to treat individual patients. It’s pretty grim.