Dad
I went to hospital with my father yesterday to discuss whether he should undergo chemotherapy or not. I haven't visited a chemotherapy clinic for some time and I'd forgotten just how downbeat these places are. Everyone there has terminal cancer. Few really believe the chemo will work. They really could have done with a visit from Robin Williams and some of his zany, Hollywood-style, brand of inspirational humour. As it was we had to just make do with one of the consultants wearing a brown bow tie. It was limp.
.
10 months ago my father had his bladder removed and replaced with a 'neo bladder' made from a chunk of colon. The operation was a success and he was looking fit enough to leave hospital after only a few days. Then the infections started. He was in and out of hospital for 7 months and we almost lost him three or four times. He's out now and I wish him a long and healthy life. Currently he's working on what appears to be a replica of Disney's Magic Castle in his back garden. He claims it's a tool shed.
.
The surgery was pretty cutting-edge stuff. Bowel and bladder cancer has killed several people in my father's family and, in the past, once it was diagnosed all we could do was sit there and watch them die. I understand that, if the Democrats win the US Elections, we'll all be able to eat stem-cell burgers in a couple of years that will cure pretty much anything but, in the meantime, the surgery impressed me. The care staff are also, without exception, fantastic. It has been said many times that nurses work long hours, doing a difficult job for not much money. It's 100% true. A lot of money goes into the Health Service not much of it reaches these people.
.
Then, after hopefully extending my father's life by the use of this new surgery, the hospital almost killed him because of sloppy hygiene. It was a close-run thing but my father managed to stay with us. It was a terrible six months though and, as a secondary issue, I wonder how much his seven months in hospital cost the Health Service.
.
Apparently, Dad was not suffering from the much discussed superbug, MRSA. He had something called MSSA and so won't be counted in the national MRSA figures. Something like 5,000 people supposedly die from MRSA every year; based on our experiences I strongly suspect the real number of people dying from post operative infections is much higher. We're looking at something in the 5,000-20,000 range and the National Audit Office has recently indicated just as much. I appreciate that life is a precious, fragile gift that we should never take for granted; a driver nodding off at the wheel for a moment or a spoonful of fat in the wrong place can end a life in a heartbeat but it is wretched to think that thousands of people are dying every year, in a country as wealthy as ours, just because hospital support staff can't be bothered to wash their hands or keep the wards clean.
.
A friend of my brother's was admitted into the same ward as my father with a nasty compound leg fracture. He was so concerned about picking up a lethal bug in hospital that he only ate food his family brought him and hobbled out on crutches, in immense pain, as soon as he was able. I talked about his behaviour with a couple of nurses in that hospital and elsewhere, remarking on just how paranoid people had become; all of the nurses said that, no, he was not paranoid and he was just being sensible. They said they would have done the same.
.
I also commented to a nurse in St Thomas' Hospital that I thought it was little strange that patients' meals were being prepared in a facility 200 miles from London and trucked to my father's hospital in North London. Sometimes the food is edible, frequently it is not. She laughed and said that this was better than St Thomas' where patients were normally given cold sandwiches. Mmmm, this struck me as a little strange as the Government spent £40 million on revamping the NHS menu 3 years ago; engaging the assistance of TV Masterchef presenter Lloyd Grossman and a posse of Britain's best chefs. It was in all the papers. I remember that story very well as the new menus supposedly included such ingredients as seafood, dill and Parmesan and oriental dishes using the best cuts of meat. Sounds tasty I thought, maybe I should get sick.
.
John Reid, the Minister of Health, was on TV discussing the MRSA issue last week. He explained that the problem was a result of underfunding by the previous Conservative Government. The Labour Party has been in power for 7 years and John Reid is a dick. On my last visit to hospital I noticed that some genius had taken putting up posters everywhere explaining to staff how to wash their hands. Somehow, the thought that hospital stuff need illustrated posters explaining how to clean themselves was not reassuring. There is also some talk of reintroducing Florence Nightingale's basic standards of ward hygiene and care procedures, which is also far from reassuring given that she was doing her thing 150 years ago. Progress?
.
So, some of the most vulnerable people in our country; the old, the young, the sick are being killed by our hospitals at the rate of something like 5,000 - 20,000 a year, maybe more. For many, their last meal on this Earth comprises a half-frozen cheese salad sandwich made by an illegal East European immigrant, with no background in food preparation, in a shed 200 miles away. Doesn't this make the whole War on Terror; the millions spent on security, the wasted effort of countless thousands of people, the stockpiling of smallpox and other vaccines against imagined terrorist attacks seem just a little pathetic? And wicked?
No comments:
Post a Comment