A Friday evening is probably the worst time in the week to be admitted to hospital. Not only is it the busiest day of the week, the day when all the drunken morons are admitted having chipped their teeth on the pavement after falling out of the pub, but it is the start of the weekend, when all the senior medical staff stay at home since they seem unable to grasp the concept of overlapping shifts. Bank holiday Fridays are especially bad, as the weekend lasts through to the following Tuesday.
On this particular bank holiday weekend I was relatively lucky, since there were actually a few qualified doctors on site. Even the miserable harpy in the admissions ward had been one, which is why she was able to prescribe my giant wind-up insulin syringe, but was clearly way too qualified to bandage up my rotting foot. However, two of the ward nurses had spent what seemed like an hour doing an excellent job of this, so I now had a beautifully-woven example of the bandager’s art protecting my injured limb. Good enough for the deadest of Egyptian royalty, it felt snug and secure and didn’t hurt at all.
A doctor came round to examine me. ‘Take off that bandage’, was the first step. Scissors snipped and a cloud of flies immediately gathered around the rotting flesh that used to be a foot. They were kept at bay by the incredible stench.
‘We’ll book you in for an operation this evening. It’s a fairly routine procedure. You’ll be home by the end of the week.’
He took a marker pen from his pocket and wrote something on the whiteboard at the head of my bed. We all had one of these, displaying all those private little details like name, reason for admission, and special dietary requirements that any nosey bugger liked to read. Mine now said NBM: nil by mouth.
‘No food or drink until you’ve had your op. The drip will keep you going.’
‘Well, at least I’m not on the Liverpool Care Plan’, I joked weakly. This got his attention. The Liverpool Care Plan is a treatment regime whereby the patient is doped up to the eyeballs but not fed, and is used to help the staff feel better whilst incidentally making patients die quietly, or ‘pass away less traumatically’, as if dying wasn’t about as traumatic as it got.
‘Are you a medical man?’, he asked.
‘Not really, though I do have a doctorate. I’m a scientist. I design medical diagnostic devices’, I replied.
‘Oh’, he said. He immediately became more cagy and wrote something else on my whiteboard. Doctors don’t like it when their patients can actually understand the technical gibberish they like to use in an attempt to talk over their heads whilst they are in the same room. Of course, I may have developed a somewhat cynical view, but I’m looking at events with a rather jaundiced eye. As it turned out, jaundice of the eye is about the only medical condition I’ve not yet had.
‘I’ll be back after lunch with the paperwork’, he said, and sidled off to taunt his next victim. Lukasz went past, talking into a mobile phone, so I waved him over.
‘Can I use my phone in here?’, I asked. ‘I need to call my mum.’
‘No mobile allowed’, he said, his own still clasped to his ear. Apparently this rule didn’t apply to staff. I knew that medical devices were entirely resilient to the weak radio signals generated by phone handsets. Would they seriously license any life-critical device if it had been put together so badly that a phone could knock it out as if it were one of those flimsy Jumbo jets?
‘Patients use Patientline.’
He indicated a flat-screen monitor on a jointed swing-out arm attached to the wall. It looked like something from the Star Trek sick bay, so I had assumed it was some sort of vital signs monitor, despite the fact that it clearly had a telephone handset dangling from it and continuously showed a picture of Simon Cowell.
This is costing you an arm and a leg. Literally, once we get the arm as well.
‘Do you have any money? You need to get a card.’
I poked around in my cupboard, found my wallet and handed over a £10 note, the only cash I had. Lukasz went to a machine down the corridor and came back with a card. He stuck this into a slot in the machine, which he moved to hang within reach over my bed. These consoles were provided to prevent patients going on a rampage through the ward, screaming with the boredom. In addition to a telephone they provided a few satellite TV channels, radio, a games console, and even access to the internet via a tiny keyboard on the back of the phone handset. This bountiful supply of mindless brain-fodder was available at an eye-wateringly extortionate price, which fully explained the ban on mobile phones in the ward. I am reasonably technically proficient around electronic devices, but the idiots who designed the insane software on these consoles clearly weren’t. Like much of the NHS, it was a compromise cobbled together by committee, a solution that no sane person would ever have reached by themselves. These things were entirely unusable if you were unlucky enough to have been born before 1990 or, like most patients, failed to have a postgraduate degree in computer science.
I phoned home, explaining that I was calling from the hospital and not to worry. This, of course, provoked an immediate panic, and I was told to stay there ‘cos my mum was coming in to see me. All the way from Wales.
The conversation had lasted half an hour, so I now had £6.40 on my card. Sixty pence more and I’d have been able to watch TV for the whole two days until my mum turned up. These machines were clearly there to bankrupt any little old ladies unfortunate enough to have ended up in hospital, along with their entire families for the next few generations. The company that made them has now gone bust, I’m glad to say.
My Left Foot 