picture from The University of Nottingham

There’s nothing quite like a swift visit to hospital in which you are seen to straight away and are all patched up and home in time for dinner and Eastenders. What happened this evening was indeed nothing like. Mandi visited a walk-in centre in town to try and get something done about her neck which has started to niggle as an after-effect of her falling down the stairs recently. As I hadn’t had an after lunch email from her I started to worry as I was stuck in court unable to use the phone, with my mobile in my locker. As soon as I was ready to leave work for the day I noticed several missed calls and a text saying that Mandi had been taken to hospital, the Queen’s Medical Centre to be exact, the scene of my visits following my bicycle accidents. I arrived to find Mandi on a stretcher wearing an uncomfortable looking neck brace and in a lot of pain. She then told me that the walk-in centre had been great with her, but because the place isn’t staffed by medics they are too scared to do anything for fear of getting it wrong. Therefore she had a big box like neck support fitted and was left in the same position for two hours before an ambulance arrived. I didn’t have any change on me (buses in Nottingham have a stupid policy of only accepting the correct money and not giving change) and didn’t want to waste time trying to break a note, so I walked from Crown Court to QMC in about twenty minutes, so how an ambulance took two hours is anyone’s guess.

After waiting an hour Mandi was taken in to have an x-ray, and was then wheeled into a bay while the results came through (I’m not sure how the process works but I reckon they’d have been quicker going to Snappy Snaps). Every now and again a member of staff came to see how she was before announcing that they would be back ‘in a minute’ and never being seen again. Most of them said that they were going for the x-rays so I assume they all got locked in and could be still waiting to be rescued.

I nodded off in the chair next to Mandi’s ‘bed’ for a bit and when I woke up it had been two hours since the x-rays were taken. The desk staff denied that their colleagues had been accidentally locked in the x-ray room but a nurse arrived as I was returning to Mandi to check her over and then left to ‘get the x-rays’. I wasn’t prepared to lose another member of nursing staff so I offered to accompany him to fetch the mystical x-rays but he assured me that he would be straight back, which he was after about fifteen minutes.

The NHS are under pressure, I appreciate that and would never disparage the work they do. However it does make you feel useless when you can’t do anything other than wait. If someone popped in to say hello and offer reassurance that the patient had not been forgotten about it might help because that is how it feels from the patient point of view.

Thankfully, we were home in time for the repeat broadcast of Eastenders on BBC3.

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