Easter is here already, and I am relieved of the responsibility of getting anyone out of bed other than me for the next two weeks. This makes me quite cheerful. While I am known for being generally quite chirpy of a morning, this is only the case if I am allowed to have a cup of coffee and half an hour (at least) of solitary reading before I am expected to engage with anyone else. Having to coax various offspring out of their pits before my happy face is in place is known to test the bounds of my patience, and brings on what London sister refers to as my ‘psycho Mary Poppins’ persona. Gritted teeth, determinedly cheerful voice and walking (and occasionally falling off) the fine line between perky and profane.
It turns out that pulling an all-nighter in A&E with a miserable child (don’t panic, mum, she’s FINE – NHS111 sent us up there but their concept of emergency does not translate to actual emergency care) also tests my patience, especially when communications break down within the hospital and things are missed. The streaming clinician telling child they need to go to Urgent Care where they’ll be seen quickly, for example, but no one having told the clinician that Urgent Care had closed. Then, because we’d been through triage once and then got put back on the system as they’d taken her off because she’d been sent to Urgent Care (that wasn’t open), they failed to take bloods which were finally done at 4.30am – and then the doctor said they couldn’t do anything for various reasons, and to get a GP appointment. I laughed in a what was, according to the child, quite a scary way. These days you can only get a GP appointment if you phone in an arbitrary half hour slot on a Thursday afternoon, a month in advance, and there’s a z in the month. Or if you dial upwards of 50 times (my record is 96) to get into the queue at 8.30am and pray that by the time you get through there’s an appointment left. And now the nurse practitioner (lovely lady, did all the medication reviews, HRT and generally useful things) has left which will reduce options even more. The child also needs a consultant appointment – a telephone clinic – so she attempted to book online, only to find there were no appointments and to leave a number and the clinic would phone back. They did not phone back – the next contact was a letter telling her if she didn’t book an appointment she’d be discharged. I suppose the theory is that you’ll either be better or dead by the time you actually get to see anyone, which at least reduces waiting lists. You can’t fault the actual people on the NHS frontline (which includes some of my favourite friends) but something is going wrong somewhere.
AND the bloody coffee machine was broken.
After six hours I was forced to channel my inner dad, and explain that we’d been there many hours at this point, and that I did have two other children who I needed to make sure got to school and perhaps a doctor might like to talk to us so we could leave? I was extremely polite but my inner psycho Mary P was very definitely in evidence. The only plus was that we’d been there so long that the buses had started running again so at least we could get home.
We got home, I made sure the other two were at least awake and then went to bed, slept for a few hours and was in work for afternoon meetings…. FML, quite frankly. FML.
Things making me happy this week (not the NHS)
- Monday morning coffee with an old colleague
- Getting a lot of crochet done on my scarf – obviously I’d rather it hadn’t been overnight in the A&E dept, but there we are
- Finishing the Rivendell cross stitch – next up, a Michael Powell kit that’s been lurking in the stash
- Getting up to date on the temperature cross stitch
- Discovering a rather magical new book – Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – and a whole new genre of literature (cats and books in Japan)
- A visit from London sister, although I think my cats are trying to kill her
- An Easter morning swim
Hopefully you’re all having a lovely Easter weekend filled with chocolate and hot cross buns.
Same time next week then!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Voodoo River – Robert Crais
Sweets – Tim Richardson
At Home/Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson (Audible)
Kick Back – Val McDermid
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – Satoshi Yagisawa
The Easy Life in Kamusari – Shion Miura
What Kirsty did next 