13 October (Part 3) - The Covid only National Health Service
Last night I missed the Public Cabinet meeting in favour of meeting a friend who had
let the side down somewhat by being my first to be struck down with Covid. He
spent two weeks in hospital, delirious at times, but was released ten days ago and
the only after effect is some loss of energy, but nothing I noticed.
His whole household caught the bug but none was particularly unwell and the NHS
looked after him well. Since release a nurse has visited daily and yesterday was the first on
which she was happy to see him leave home.
Track and Trace proved to be a nuisance if not actually totally useless. Each
day they phoned his wife to make sure she was quarantining at home and issued
threats when they were unable to speak to my friend even though they had been
notified he was in hospital.
If only so much attention could be lavished on another friend. He is due a
procedure later this week which is likely to cause internal bleeding. Not
usually a problem except that he is on Warfarin, a blood thinner.
Because of that he was prescribed an alternative that has to be injected. He was
told to get it himself. Five pharmacy visits later he obtained what he needed
and called the hospital to arrange the twice daily nurse visits. He was told
they had changed their minds about visiting and could he get his doctor to do it.
His doctor is one from the burgeoning useless brigade and he refused to have anything to do with helping
a seriously unwell man.
The hospital said that in that case they would have to cancel the urgently required
possibly cancer related procedure.
A compromise has been reached. My friend will have to visit the hospital twice daily for the vital injection.
Next time a Government minister tells you that the NHS is functioning normally don’t believe him.
My own relatively minimal and trivial NHS involvement requires a check up every
six months. For the past two years the interval has been stretched from the
specified 26 weeks to anything between 28 and 30 weeks.
It doesn’t sound much but it is a 10% reduction in NHS services which once again
has the potential to worsen cancer rates.