365 Days That Count - Day 44 - I hate hospitals.

I’ve had my fair share of negative experiences with doctors and hospitals and yesterday I had another.

My mum woke up with a nosebleed, but this was no normal nosebleed, blood was literally pouring out of her. By the time I got there her bathroom looked like a crime scene and she was covered in blood.

I took her to the emergency rooms at our local, private and very expensive hospital. By this point she had lost and swallowed so much blood she was green, pale and shaking.

We sat there for over an hour before she was even seen. I tried to tell myself they were busy but I knew from the total lack of urgency as they walked past the waiting room they were not.

Eventually we went in and she was left for another 15 minutes until a nurse came to ask her a list of the most ridiculously irrelevant questions before trying to make her in any way more comfortable. My mum is 61, I think for anyone to have a nosebleed that bad would be disconcerting but by this stage she was quite panicked and their total lack of empathy was shocking.

Then a doctor who looked like he’d graduated last week came in and asked her the same list of irrelevant questions all over again. He appeared rather put off by the amount of blood and hardly touched her.

He left it to the nurse to roughly shove an adrenaline soaked rectangle sponge in each nostril before telling us that would stop the bleeding and leaving the bed. You could tell they hadn’t been inserted nearly high enough and were immediately soaked with blood.

I went and found the doctor and suggested they called the ENT which he agreed to do without even going back to check on her himself.

Another 20 minutes went by before they came back with a balloon which they inserted into her nose and then inflated telling us it would stop the bleeding within 30 minutes. By now she could hardly breathe, they still hadn’t bothered to clean the blood off her face and I was fucking furious.

I’m no doctor but it was clear that the bleeding was not going to stop. I phoned the ENT’s rooms myself only to find out he was in surgery and wouldn’t be able to see her for another 2 hours - if they had called him when we first arrived he could’ve seen her before going in.

The baby doctor then reappeared to tell us she would have to leave the balloon in over night. This sent her into a panic and me into a rage.

I called the ENT’s rooms again and told his receptionist we’d be waiting for him when he got out of surgery.

We’d now been in the hospital for over 4 hours and she was still bleeding. We went home so she could change out of her blood stained clothes and went back to wait for the specialist.
I was literally praying to every spirit I could think of that he'd be able to sort it out, I knew how awful it would have been for her to have that thing in her nose over night.

Eventually we saw him and he contradicted pretty much everything we’d been told up to that point. He also said the first thing they had inserted in her nose was rough and totally the wrong approach which had probably made the whole situation worse.
He removed the balloon, cauterised the bleed and we left.

I haven't been that angry in a long time. I'd watched my mum go through this horrible experience for nearly 8 hours because people are incompetent, because they don't use logic and because they are unequipped and incapable of saying so.

I hate hospitals. Rant over.

I think I need a little meditation :)

Love,

Daisy xx

( @daisyd )