I am now at home, finally, after a hellish afternoon at the Marsden.

As per my post of the other day, I had managed to keep a sense of humour at all the fuck ups by the nurses and team from when I was admitted, but it wore thin today. The ‘normal’ fuck ups continued – from the nurse last night wanting to give me the next dose of my 6 hourly antibiotics 2 hours after the last ones…to another nurse making two extremely painful and failed attempts at putting in a cannula when she should have got the doc to come straight away. Who, for the record, did come and got it immediately.

Today I was due to see my surgeon at around 1.30pm to hopefully be discharged. I chased twice from around 12.30pm to get my antibiotics and painkillers which were due at 12pm…finally the nurse rocks up at 1pm and my vein promptly collapses…the ‘new’ one. She says we will wait for the doc to see if I can get that dose orally as I am due to be discharges with oral antibiotics anyway. Fine. Surgeon comes and says I can go home and just come to see her tomorrow instead of staying in hospital. She then says she will go straight to the nurse to write the prescriptions I needed. This is now around 2pm.

I am feeling pretty crappy today – nauseous all day, very weak and exhausted – no sleep in hospital from the medications to the tea lady at 7am stroppy because I didn’t want tea.. So, dying to get home. The nurse says I can go as soon as I get my meds which should take around 30 mins – I ask can I bring the prescription to the pharmacy but apparently not, the ward pharmacist needs to sort it out. Fine – I go away for 30 mins, come back and she says I can go and collect the meds downstairs in 10 mins. Great – I say bye to everyone and off I go with The Man. The pharmacy downstairs says they only received the prescription 5 mins ago (so an hour after the conversation with the nurse) and anyway they can’t give it to me – it has to be given to me on the ward. At this point I am ready to pass out, quite literally.

The Man goes up to the ward to see what is going on as I couldn’t. Apparently its all my fault since I wanted to go to get the meds myself and I hadn’t been discharged yet. I lost it. I refused to go back up to the ward, for the 3rd time while knowing the meds weren’t even there, and asked to make a formal complaint. Which I did, at length -the woman who was taking the complaint then went up to get me the meds, returning with the nurse. Who, at now 4pm, gave me the 5 boxes of meds – when I saw that the antibiotics said 4x day, I asked her when I was meant to start them – at the same realising that since 6am I hadn’t had any. I was completely stunned – not only had they failed to give me antibiotics when I was due them, orally since the vein had collapsed, she is handing them to me 4 hours late without saying to take them now. I have been admitted as an emergency case into hospital because of a post op infection and then nobody gives a shit about the antibiotics I am meant to take.  We were all stunned at this point. The nurse left and I just started sobbing – I was feeling terrible, hadn’t eaten all day, this level of couldn’t give a shit attitude had finally got to me. I sobbed pretty much all the way home, at home…and eventually stopped and managed to get some food in me.

I honestly can’t get over how fucking awful the whole thing was – from start to finish. I have to go back to see the surgeon tomorrow where she will likely have to drain more fluid from my breast as its seriously swollen again – a pretty bloody unpleasant experience. But will also tell her what went on. And I am just so very, very tired and pissed off. To treat people who are vulnerable in this way hits at the very core of me – it is fundamentally wrong and incenses me. Unfortunately all my energy went into this shit today as opposed to my healing, hence the non stop bloody tears for hours.