Up until then, it was all going so well! It was never on my Santa list to spend Christmas night in A&E but here I am. I’ve been here a few times before but always with other people. This time it’s me on my own. It’s 3.18 in the morning and I’m waiting for the blood & urine results to come back. The ECG showed nothing but as the chap doing it said ‘it only proves the heart was working while we were doing it’. Thanks.
What got me here? Well – a taxi. Never thought I’d get one at 11 on Christmas night and there was nobody to drive me. I live on my own, but bugger me the dispatcher got me one in ten minutes and stayed on the phone until it arrived. Nice chap.
I’d been out for the turkey n’sprouts bit in the afternoon after a four mile walk into and around Brighton while the turkey cooked. The plan was for me to cook it and let it rest whilst I drove it over to my partner’s place twenty five minutes down the road. She did the rest and there were four of us. I did a good job with the bird (if I say so myself) which I was assured used to be a resident of Norfolk and had been fed on caviar… or was it corn? I did all the bacony/sausagey/stuffing x two bits, wrapped the whole lot in towels and hit the road. All went well and I narrowly avoided burning her place down lighting the pud with an indecent amount of Tescos finest cooking brandy. I left them to it when party games were mentioned and drove home for a quiet evening with a Downton repeat and the new Taylor Sheridan on Paramount. The Downton one was where Carson has to discuss what he expected in the bedroom from his forthcoming bride. Excruciating but one feels for people who aren’t as relaxed over these things as I am. I ceased to be relaxed when my Fitbit which I always wear, set off an alarm. Never seen that one before. Low pulse. Below 46 to be precise. I checked it with my BP machine. It concurred. No other symptoms but the pump isn’t supposed to do that, and I don’t have a spare. It came back to normal quickly but the BP stayed highish. What to do? On my own. The rest of the world pissed or out of it. So I did what it says on a gents wall somewhere above the urinal. I phoned 111. Now that’s a surreal experience. Keep pressing options. It finds out where you are first which takes ages. Then it offers to send you a video about something or other. Then it texts you with something else and then there was a guy on the other end. It’s no use explaining anything to him. I’m not even sure he’s human. He just starts at the top of very long flow chart and says please answer all the totally irrelevant questions so we can get to the other end, which we eventually did. There was a bit of whirring and a lot of clicking and then it spat out it’s decision.
“Can you get to A&E? Don’t drive yourself”
So that’s how I got here and there’s just two of us left. The young Indian lady doctor is very smiley but my offer to come back in the morning fell on stony ground. So did my ‘white coat syndrome’ explanation for the high BP. So I wait. I think she wants to cover her arse with the tests. I’m going to see the head honcho cardiologist at this hospital anyway, in a couple of weeks, privately, to check on my longstanding minor murmur. So I guess she doesn’t want a bollocking. There’s talk of a seven-day wearable ECG but that for after Xmas no doubt.
The usual rich selection of flora and fauna from across the world keep me company. A Congolese chap that could have been a bouncer being regaled by a Polish sounding pissed bloke at a decibel level likely to cause pain. A rough-sleeper who said he was ex-forces, natch – there for reasons unspecified. Sort of bloke you’d cross the street to avoid but perfectly fine talking to him. The Polish chap must have wished everyone in Brighton Merry Christmas by the time he left. They could all have easily heard him.
Then a severely disturbed young woman in a wheelchair was wheeled in screaming and throwing herself about. More than just drugs. You see enough of that around these parts. She didn’t last long before being wheeled off to somewhere sinister.
They’ve ECG-ed me, made me pee into a very small container – might have been a test to see if I could hit it – drawn blood by the gallon and left me cannulated – in case I might need stuff putting back in me. And so we wait…
They’ve just called me back in.
Postscript. I’m back home now at 5.00am. Nothing drastic but BP still very high. She says I might need to change my pills but that’s the GP’s job and they’ve written to him. I’ve got a copy already. Bits of the NHS work very well. It’s just under two miles so I walked home along the seafront. Lovely doc lady thought it was a good idea if slightly insane. And it’s a lovely morning too. Dead calm, just the sound of a few desultory waves half-heartedly lapping the shingle. Reminded me of getting home from work, when I did, at ungodly hours. Haven’t walked around at this time of day for years. Why did I do it? Because I could, mainly.
5.35am: I’m going to bed now. Somebody open up the shop will you?
James Leary is the pseudonym of a retired passenger jet Captain.
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And just to provide a contrast, a very different experience here. I’ve never ever heard of hospitals not doing emergency surgery at night, and if anybody has experienced a ruptured appendix you’ll know how excruciating it is and the subsequent complications should it not be operated on in time. This poor guy, who just so happened to be a retired GP, was let down and made to suffer unnecessarily due to seriously bad management;
https://x.com/ItsnotrightUK/status/1871721396428214780
According to the unfortunate doctor, it’s down to under funding the NHS – a lot of people still believe that nonsense.
It’s vastly over funded for the results it delivers.
Like most of the rest of modern England, too many graduates and not enough engineers (or in this, doctors/nurses).
“In 2009 nursing became an all-degree profession”, I wonder how many would-be nurses are thereby lost to the profession.
I was chatting to my son’s MIL over Christmas. She is a retired ED nurse and I was asking her about the value of a degree (which she took latterly as it was required for future advancement. She said it made little difference to her core nursing ability but was personally interesting.
I have a relative who works in a hospital where there is just one anaesthatist on duty at night. So if one operation gets under way, and someone else is rushed in needing life saving surgery, they are screwed. The result is that the operating theatre is idle until or unless a life-or-death operation is required.
Lovely humorous writing. Thank you and good luck.
Thank you. I’m glad I was bored enough sitting there to write (most of) it. Being in A&E and being frightened is worse.
I suspect that heart rate monitors can be unreliable, my GP checked mine a few years back and it came out in the forties, cue questions about super fitness (not), followed by appointment for ECG test, found to be normal My BP monitor often gets it wrong, or at least is inconsistent.
Another little known fact is that blood pressure can drop during illness, checked mine during a recent bout with norovirus (the virus won), it was much lower than normal. Hence, consider or at least don’t worry about missing BP medication when ill. Dr Suneel has a youtube video on this issue.
So he didn’t feel at all ill and it was just the electronics on his arm that started it all off. It reminds me of all the people who need a home test in a box to tell them they have Covid because they don’t have symptoms.
Agreed. This Covid addiction is akin to virtue signalling. ‘It must be deadly because I’ve got it, look!’
The fact that you may be running an immune system battle against half a dozen other viruses at the same time is irrelevant to these people. Symptoms are only there to alert you that your immune system may be losing its battle again one of the things you’ve already got. We would be permanently ‘under the weather’ otherwise.
My training taught me that you should never act on a single warning from a single source. Which is why I cross checked the wrist monitor with an independent BP machine which gave the same result. And low heartbeat usually goes with low BP. Mine was elevated. Still is. Something going on. Act.
Glad you’re OK.
Jabbed?
Thanks – so am I! Jabbed? ‘Course not.
Has there been an attendence charge for an A&E visit – say £100 – would you have still gone?
So cooking turkey, driving it to another location, food preparation, big blow-out meal, drive back. Gosh. I wonder what might explain high blood pressure?
Having read the referenced X post, and various responses to it, I don’t feel it qualifies as solid evidence of anything
Toss the Fitbit/Apple Watch. Get a decent cardiac check up including a stress treadmill, nothing invasive. Make sure the cardiologist listens to your heart. Take it from there. An echo, a 24 holter monitor. That is it.
if you took the covid jabs, ask for a d-dimer bloodtest.