Another Visit To A&E

(Wednesday) Carol has been in a great deal of pain for the past couple of days. It's really difficult for me to see her in so much agony and not be able to help get at least some respite from it. She has taken a lot of pain relief medication, but it doesn't seem to work. Some can work for a couple of hours, but then the discomfort comes back. If we wanted to get a doctor's appointment for her it would be a real effort to first get through to Ashfield Medical Centre, probably a 30-minute wait to actually get through and then, having explained to the receptionist why she needed an appointment in the first place, she would be offered a doctor's telephone call some time later, possibly 3-4 hours later, who would access what the problem was and possibly ask her to come into the surgery for an appointment, maybe at the end of the afternoon, say 5 or 6 o'clock. By which time the pain would have become so intense it wouldn't make much difference. So the alternative was to go to Accident and Emergency at Milton Keynes Hospital. Which is what we did.

Carol drove and we managed to find a parking space in the ground-level carpark which is, fortunately, directly opposite the entrance to A and E, and a relatively short walk. Once in I reported to the receptionist while Carol sit down because she was in so much pain. We then sat down in the waiting area and watched some daytime television, something about people who re-let their council homes, illegally. I think Dom Littlewood was presenter. It's called 'Council House Crackdown,' which was followed by 'Homes Under The Hammer.' By which time Carol was called into the triage nurse's room and she described what her problem was. Then we just had to sit back in the waiting room area. There was a sign up near the reception desk which said that waiting-time was between 3 and 4 hours, which didn't exactly make things any better. Also, the chairs in these places aren't the most comfortable. Is this deliberate, I wonder, to deter time-wasters? Probably not. By the time the next programme came on after 'Homes After The Hammer,' (which gives you some idea how long we had to wait.) we were called into another room by a doctor, who took a great many detailed notes and managed to access Carol's notes on the hospital computer system, one of the great advantages of this technology. From there we went into the depths of the A and E department where Carol had cubicle 9 to herself, and was able to lay on the trolley in there. Things began to move a good deal faster and a nurse came and put a canala in her wrist and because they had by now pinpointed the possible centre of the pain as being a urinary infection two nurses came and put in a catheter which can't have been particularly pleasant. Another doctor's interview and then Carol was eventually moved into a new area of the A and E department, called the Observation Unit, which had five beds in it and when we arrived Carol was the only patient but it gradually filled up with other patients. The idea of this unit being that the staff would observe a patient before deciding what action to take regarding their care plan.

The lady doctor who has been helping Carol manage her pain came to see her in the Observation Unit. She seems very keen to help Carol find something which will control the pain she is experiencing and spent a lot of time discussing the matter.  It was decided that Carol would move to another ward sometime that evening, probably Ward 8, but as there presumably wasn't a bed available there would be no chance of her being transferred that evening. I was about to leave for home and would have to telephone in the morning to discover where she was going to finally end up.

(Thursday) I had to ring the hospital to try and discover which ward Carol had eventually gone to
over-night. I rang the reception and attempted to get through to the Observation Unit, but they weren't answering. I gave it 20 minutes and rang again and this time I got an answer. The nurse I spoke to took some while to discover where Carol had been taken, Ward 2. So I drove into the hospital campus and parked in the multi-storey carpark and walked into the main entrance and managed to find the ward without too much trouble.