About this Blog

This blog started as an online diary and place for me to rant about annoyances in my family.

However since July it has become a place for me to catalogue and express my views and opinions on the treatment I have recieved following the diagnosis of a potentially cancerous tumor in my bowel.

On 3rd August 2011 I was told that it was cancerous. In April 2012 I was given the all clear.

October 15th 2013 I was diagnosed with peritoneal disease and liver metastases. The cancer was back and this time it is inoperable.

It is a little bit out of date as the NHS doesn't tend to have a WiFi connection in hospital and I can only post when I get home and posts take a while to write.

It is NOT about individuals or the nursing profession. It is about some of the inadequacies in the system and the way the NHS is failing some people.

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Monday 16 June 2014

Was I actually a statistic??

Since leaving hospital last week I have been pondering about what happened while I was in hospital and whether things actually worked how I expected them too.

Let me explain that a bit better. 

I was admitted to A&E, and moved to the Acute Medical Unit, then a general ward and finally a gastroentrological surgical ward. Sounds OK, those were the problems I had and have. 

But here is the cruncher, I am also a cancer patient. I never felt like I was being treated as a cancer patient. The Consultant that I saw was not an oncologist, I am not even sure if they were used to dealing with cancer patients, or whether cancer was something that they were using in their diagnosis, treatment plans or ongoing care plans. 

I don't even think I should have been discharged from the hospital. I have to think that they should have been helping me look at long term options as I do not feel any better than I felt on discharge last week and the hospital should maybe have done more to look into the type of care I am going for now. 

Where does this fault lie. Not every NHS trust can have specialist cancer services. Services in this part of the country feel very spread out. When I was admitted where should I have gone? Would I have been better being admitted to Royal Surrey where they have the cancer specialists and wards to provide better care for oncology patients? Would I have ended up with better 'holistic' treatment? 

I don't know, I am not an NHS commissioning manager or who ever makes these kid of decisions. But what I do know is some of the decisions I have made over the last week have been incredibly hard and have almost been made more difficult because of some of the levels of care I did or didn't receive when I was in hospital.

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