One step forward…

As is the way of such things, the poor old FIL is back into the high dependency unit. It goes like this, late last week he was pootling along well and making good steps forward (10m forward on his Zimmer to be exact) and they decided that they would transfer him to a small local hospital for rehabilitation and physiotherapy before sending him home. So, he wakes up on Friday ready to get transferred and after a little while the hospital calls us. Now we thought that it would be to tell us when he would be arriving at the local hospital, but no, it seems he had to do things the hard way; the call was to tell us that he had started to bleed internally – from somewhere in the gut but they didn’t know where and couldn’t see from where with an endoscope. Now where all this came from we have no idea as he went in for coronary artery bypass surgery (hardly connected) but they gave us the grim news that his blood loss was so severe that they were taking him down to surgery and did not expect him to survive.

That was it, we all rushed down the hospital and proceeded to wait…and wait and wait and wait. No one told us anything; no one even offered us a cup of tea. We waited and occasionally chased the staff who said there was no news and a doctor would come and see us (soon!). We waited some more and then were eventually told that he had come through the operation fine and was in recovery waiting to be transferred to HDU. A while later someone took us down to the HDU waiting room and we had only been in there a few minutes when we were collected and taken to another waiting room over the other side of the hospital (at ITU). I was not best pleased at all the uncomfortable chairs and long walks all over the place and the MIL was suffering, but you get on with it in these circumstances, don’t you? Anyway, we were told that they would get the FIL settled and we could then go in and see him – hopefully in about 45 minutes. After an hour had passed, hubby went to see what was going on and after a half hour wait at reception he was told that they had never heard of the FIL! Eventually they tracked him down to the first place we had been taken to – we saw him (he was asleep), the nurses said they had no idea what had happened in surgery and there was still no doctor to talk to. By this time it was ten o’clock at night and we were told to go home and come back in the following day after lunch to see what was going on!

The long and the short of it is this – they opened him up and found nothing wrong. The bleeding had stopped on its own so they stitched him back together and are keeping him in HDU for a couple of days to keep an eye on him. So, here he is, nearly 80 years old, being cut open for no reason – I’m sure that’ll speed his recovery up no end.

Grrr, do you get the feeling that I think the NHS really stinks sometimes?