Wiltshire Farm Foods

On the 9th Feb I popped along to the hospital for my op. The whole day was a surreal and unecessarily unpleasant experience. First of all, you have to arrive at 7.30 in the morning at the Clinical Support Unit. Why so early? The wards don't start chucking people out until at least 10am. Luckily it doesn't take long to get ready as you can't have breakfast or anything to drink before you come. The CSU is the another depressing place to hang about. Unlike most other bits of the hospital that I had to wait in there was no TV and it was freezing cold once you'd been sat there a while - and I ended up sat there for 6 and a half hours.

They couldn't find a bed for me and it was getting closer and closer to the time I was going to have my op and they still didn't have a bed. This seems to be quite a common thing - how much does that cost then? Surgeons, anaethetists, nurses, operating theatre time, all booked up, all possibly not able to do their job because there's no bed. It doesn't make sense. And I wasn't the worst of it - at least I'm reasonably young, fit and well - there were two older women in there with me also waiting for ages. On top of everything else we were all starving and on the table in front of us was a big pile of Wiltshire Farm Foods brochures - full of pictures of plates of food. Is that really necessary? I know they don't look tasty (its a sort of privatised version of meals on wheels) but hey - it's food and I hadn't eaten since 9pm the night before.

A bed was eventually found on the day ward - fine by me as I shouldn't have needed to stay the night - and I had my op. This one was very brief and I was round and out of the hospital as soon as I could stagger about on my own two feet. Just as well as the ward was about to close as I left.

I don't want to sound like I'm endlessly moaning, because I've read some American accounts of dealing with their health system and it makes me eternally grateful that we've got a public health system that is free and accountable to us and not just shareholders. But it does seem to be very badly put together. Each bit of it does their job well, and I've been treated all along by incredibly skilled people, but the system itself doesn't seem able to join up the bits. For example - I'm treated across three different sections of the trust I'm in, and I have separate number for each one. How much potential does that provide for administrative fuck ups? Everyone tells you that the one thing you should aim for when you have cancer is to keep things as normal as possible, but this is impossible when you're kept waiting, waiting waiting, never knowing how long you're going to have to wait for the next bit of the process. It also means you can't plan anything - one of the things about this cancer - and I imagine quite a lot of other cancers - is that it doesn't actually make you fell unwell and isn't really debilitating so it is quite possible to carry on leading a perfectly normal life if only the NHS would let you. You would have to have extraordinary powers of zen not to get wound up by it - and believe me I got wound up....