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What a week.
Daughter 1 got her urgent hospital appointment. JUNE 2023.
My mother needing GP …hopeless trying, so I ended up driving her to a private Physio. Absolutely awesome under-rated clinicians. She was brilliant. I took a can of gin and tonic for mum to swill as I drove her home afterwards.

My dentist x-ray referral form for hospital, didn’t quite pass the rottweiler receptionist test. 100 phone calls, emails and arriving at bloody Bedford Hospital, BBH,only to be turned away.
At least I could pop in to see lovely Anne. She looks amazing, holding court in a 4 bay side ward.
Sadly I did not know then, that Chris who had collapsed at our house was also now in hospital.( The ambulance never did arrive at ours). She is seriously ill. I’ll go to visit next week.

Meanwhile, I was booked for urodynamics. This test as I’ve said before is embarrassingly awful. I’ve always called it Fifty Shades of indignity.
Put simply: dressed in nothing but the gaping gown favoured by hospitals everywhere. You lie on an x-ray table. A catheter is shoved in your bum. Another two catheters are shoved into your bladder. One for pressure monitoring the other for bladder filling.
The x-ray machine is lowered over you as the clinician asks: can you feel your bladder filling?
The X-ray table is tipped to upright whilst you hang on for grim
death. Can you feel your bladder ? Can you pee?
Then just to add to the fun you step away from the ( now upright table). Sit on a commode and told to pee. At this point they usually
turn taps on and leave the room.

Although invariably some male nurse seems to find an excuse to linger in the room pretending to type into a screen behind you.

This week was no exception. My answers are:

No I can’t feel it. 

No I can’t pee

Yes. I find a solitary male nurse lingering in
the room
very humiliating and unnecessary.

On a positive though the doctor was a lady, a Uro radiologist. She was wonderful fun and discrete.
Chatty – her children both training to be drs. Poor things.
Her mother needs new hips – will have to pay, because she’ll
be dead by the time they get done on NHS.

We could’ve been old friends catching up in a wine bar we chatted on …

We got on to politics. How an earth, we yelled in unison, can Jeremy Hunt dare to criticise the NHS? When he was Secretary
for Health he alienated the workforce and damaged to prospects of the NHS for ever. I told her I’d requested to speak at his select
committee. If I do, I said, to her laughter, I’d show him how a catheter works or shove one where the sun don’t shine.

Then. By Friday. He’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. WHAT? and my kicking opportunity is lost. Dam.

As for urodynamics test results. Dunno. No doubt somebody will tell me

some day, this century, what the next plan is.

Next week: Next week maybe Hunt will be PM. help!