I think I've been ghosted by the NHS
This might get a bit long so grab a coffee and sit back.
On Monday afternoon I attended my local hospital for a cystoscopy for urine retention (was holding back about a pint of urine). After the procedure I was handed a piece of paper and told to give it to the reception staff by the door.
All good so far yeah? No, you see I'm new to all this and wasn't informed that I should empty my bladder before I left, no one told me anything apart from you'll get an appointment letter in the post. So yeah, stupid me went home and started chugging tons of water to flush out my bladder.
Now here's where the problem starts. I'm pumping tons of water in to me but nothings coming out. My bladder is being stretched like an over filled water balloon and nothings coming out, and to make things even worse because the anesthetic is still inside, it's not sending any signals to my brain that I really should be using the toilet.
Now I only new this was genuinely an emergency when my friend rang me about 5pm to see how the procedure had gone. When I told them they said I should get myself straight to A and E to get it sorted. So that's exactly what I did and 8 hours later I was sent on my way with an emergency catheter, some night time bags and I was told that the twoc team and a district nurse would be out to visit me soon.
I waiting right up to Thursday and hadn't heard anything from the district nurse, the twoc team or my GP surgery. So I rang my surgery to see if the A and E discharge notes had been sent through. If you guessed that I'm going to say nope they didn't get them, you'd be correct. Brilliant, okay let's ring the district nursing team directly to see if they've got the notes, nope nothing. Excellent... A and E haven't pushed the handover off or whatever the terminology is. Time to contact PALS to see if they can do anything about this.
PALS is useless if you need something doing in less than a week, ten days is there usual timescale. More beurocratic red tape, fine I'll ring my surgery ask to speak to the practice manager and see if anything can be done that way. I ring my surgery, they put me through to a practice manager (or on duty doctor, they didn't say which) and I explain my situation to them, I inform them that I'm having issues with my bag (it's a long tube bag and is getting kinked, blocked, valve damage from all the bending by the neck of the bag etc). My surgery says they'll look in to it and I get a call from the district nurse about 2 hours later. They're going to send someone round Thursday night to sort it all out. Fantastic, we've finally got things sorted.
Wrong again. I wait up till about 3am and no one shows. I stay in all Friday and no one shows, Saturday (yesterday) no one shows. Today is Sunday (I've looked at my little notes on the NHS app and there's an entry in there in that should be flashing on the district nurses system, a referral from my GP stating that this was an urgent issue and a home visit is needed. But yet not one single person has done anything about it.
So this is where we stand. It's currently almost 7am on Sunday, I've got one night time bag left, I've some how managed to muddle through clearing a blocked valve and vaccuum sealed bag and found a way to stop this long strap banging on my leg and tugging on the end of my... ahem.. yeah that dangly thing us men have that sometimes gets in the way when we don't want it too lol.
Has the NHS literally just washed it's hands of me, am I being impatient with all this or should I be sending complaints as far up the senior management chain as I can?
