Showing posts with label elda hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elda hospital. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Good result

Seventy days ago someone from the health service rang me to tell me that my routine poo stick test showed traces of blood. I saw the doctor a couple of days after that and, in the same week, I got some blood tests. Do you remember when dentist's used to give lollipops to children after fillings? Well in Pinoso Health centre they gave me a big box. "Oohh, laxatives, just what I've always wanted".

The appointment for the colonoscopy was today at Elda Hospital. I was worried about what it might show but I wasn't at all worried about the process. This is the third time that doctors have thought I might have cancer and my concern was that, statistically, the odds must be shortening. So, the 54 hours of fasting and the Ajax like scouring effect of the laxatives passed off normally enough given the abnormal situation.

Three young woman were in charge of setting up the patients ready for a colonoscopy. They told me to strip below the waist, to leave my socks on (so far just like a 70's porn film) and to come out wearing the towel. "NO, NO, not THAT towel!!!! There was a much larger towel hanging over the screen than the one I'd found on the chair.

Once I was on the bed I with the towel arranged sarong like to give easy access I got all the usual sort of control questions - allergies, medical history, favourite musical as well as a bit of a third degree about my fasting and toilet habits. I was having a conversation about the band James with one of the women, who had done a work stint in Leeds, whilst one of the others poked and prodded me in an attempt to find veins for the cannula. She tried both arms, five attempts all together. It's an old problem, deep veins. At one point, as I clenched and unclenched my fist to pump up the veins, one of the women told me to relax, she obviously didn't think I relaxed enough - NO, RELAX. I replied that it was a bit difficult to relax knowing they were going to shove a tube up my arse. All three laughed as though I were the first person to ever make that comment. More likely, they were laughing at my Spanish. Now we're going to put you to sleep. Think about something nice.

The next time I knew anything one of the young women was saying hello and suggested that I should rub my stomach hard to get a bit of farting going. I asked what time it was, Maggie was waiting outside as I wasn't supposed to drive, and it had only been about forty minutes from start to finish.

I asked about results as they shooed me into the corridor. "The doctor will be with you shortly," they said. And, true enough a young woman doctor came and handed me a note for my GP. "Obviously we can't be absolutely certain until we've done the biopsy but all we found was a very small polyp which we've snipped off. You're in the clear".

Saturday, April 06, 2019

Nothing and nothing else

I haven't done anything very interesting for a while but that won't stop me.

I went to stand outside the Town Hall yesterday evening. Every first Friday of the month at 8pm - a reminder that violence against women needs to stop. I've done it a few times. Nobody notices but I should be there. Afterwards the group often puts on a film. I haven't been to that for ages but I did go last night. The film was called Frances Ha and it wasn't bad at all. The interesting thing was that it was introduced by a couple of young women who I think were still at school. They were speaking in Valenciano which means that I caught about as much as I would if I were in a Belshill pub late at night talking to an 80 year old local who was a boxing contender in his youth. The young women talked about similarities in style to Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen, about the handheld camera movements and the framing of the scenes. I was impressed. I don't think the majority of the students I've encountered across the years would know who Jim Jarmusch is or be interested in finding out.

I spent a bit over six hours in Elda hospital the other day. The friend of a friend had a terrible stomach ache. The local health centre sent her by ambulance to the nearest big hospital and I met her and her partner there to do the Spanish. It's the fifth time I've been to Urgencias, A&E, in the time I've been here either as patient or companion. Everything followed the "normal" pattern, the one I've seen every time, stabilisation, admission, a first consultation with a doctor who decides a course of action in this case a bunch of tests. Then a bit of a wait. This time that became a longer wait. Then they needed the emergency bay and my couple had to wait with her wheeled bed parked in a corridor. The staff were grumbling and complaining about the situation but all that NHS, abandoned in the corridors, stuff came to mind. Not that there weren't a bundle of staff around all the time but it was a corridor.

I listen to a podcast called ¿Qué? done by a couple of people who work on the English edition of el País, a Spanish newspaper in the same class as The Guardian and the New York Times. The podcast is in English and they welcome feedback. I've tweeted them, I've emailed them. I've been mentioned in the podcast a couple of times. In fact I listen to a number of podcasts and several broadcast radio programmes. I sometimes comment on those too. Last week, when a Saturday morning programme was talking about punctuality I made some comment about the late running of Spanish TV. As they read the comment out the presenter said Chris has written again. It's the same with a few podcasts and radio shows, multiple responses, "Hi Chris, nice to know you're still listening". Twitter and Facebook and email and what not almost persuade you, one, that you, one, knows these people as real people rather than disembodied voices.

Friday, February 09, 2018

It's my arm doctor

As I remember it the, "it's my arm doctor" quote was some sort of running joke. It had to be delivered with a broad Scots accent. Something to do do with the housekeeper, Janet, from Dr Finlay's Casebook.

If you have any idea what I'm talking about then you'll be old. In turn that probably means you see the doctor more frequently than you would like. Our Saturday morning coffee group is a right little hot bed of knee replacements, cataracts, stomach protectors, heart bypasses, pain relief and epileptic fits. Actually, until I fell over frothing at the mouth, having bitten off large chunks of my tongue, I felt a bit out of the conversation. Obviously I go to the doctor's from time to time but the visits have been thankfully few and far between.

Yesterday I helped a pal with his visit to the doctor. The idea was that, as I speak a few more words of Spanish than he does, I could act as a sort of translator. It wasn't that difficult. A couple of questions from the white coated doctor, a bit of tapping on the computer and out of the office in under three minutes with a prescription and an order for a blood test.

Today it was my turn. Three months since my "event" and I had a follow up visit with the neurology department at Elda Hospital. "Right oh", said the white coated doctor, (all doctors in Spain wear white coats as far as I can see. It's like British doctors have stethoscopes though one must be easier to wash and cheaper than the other.) "the electroencephalograph is clear, anything to tell us?" - I complained about a few aches and pains but said basically no. She was nice about my Spanish and she gave me the alta, the up, the opposite of the baja, the down, the equivalent of a sick note. No more treatment, no more check ups, free to drive. In the clear more or less, with certain provisos, given that collapsing in a supermarket is not a sign of robust good health.

Speaking to people about their experiences with the Spanish health system  brings a mixed bag of responses. The few times I've used them they seem to have been first rate but not everyone agrees. I'm a great believer in normal distributions, the idea that most systems are made up of the reasonably competent with far fewer poor or excellent performers. I have no complaints about the health care I've received at all. In fact I would rate it as cracking.

It was strange. Going to the local surgery yesterday I asked someone how the system worked. It was really simple but I didn't know until I asked. Today, at the hospital, I walked in to the outpatients area and there were hundreds of people sitting on hundreds of chairs. I hadn't the faintest idea where to go or what to do. The woman I asked on Patient Services was dead helpful. She rang to check I was booked in and then walked me to the chairs by the right department. Once I was settled in I realised that the people were clustered around various areas - gynaecology or cardiology or whatever. The system was crystal but to me it initially looked chaotic. As I waited I noticed that there were other people as lost as me, people asking others how the system worked, whilst others, who knew the routine, were like fish in water. I suppose we humans learn routines very quickly.

I had a similar sort of thought as I was leaving. In the entrance area there were all sorts of people from lottery ticket sellers and the people who run the various stalls and stands to the hospital staff and habitual attendees - the  accustomed regulars and the lost novices. It was gratifying to think that, at least for the while, I can number myself amongst the bewildered and lost.

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

A weekend in Elda Hospital

It must have been the price of the cat food in the Día supermarket that triggered it. I was there picking up a few essentials before going out for lunch. My eyes went funny, as though each one was switching on and off at random, and the next thing I know is that I didn't know much.  I didn't know where I was. I was confused. It took the ambulanceman to explain that I had passed out and they were about to take me to Elda hospital and only later did I remember the detail of the strange visual effects. I wonder how much disruption I caused in Día and whether I'll ever be able to shop there again?

Maggie turned up at the ambulance not long after. She wasn't with me in the supermarket so my guess is that the emergency number strip on the lock screen of my mobile phone did its job. The police found it and were able to contact her. My second guess is that the description given of my sack of potatoes impersonation in the supermarket to the 112 emergency dispatcher meant that he or she sent a specialist ambulance with a doctor on board but, when the crew found me basically recovered, they transferred me to a less specialist ambulance for transfer to hospital. Apart from thinking on my own mortality on the journey to the hospital, I've often suspected that I will not reach a ripe old age, the journey was uneventful.

It was pretty routine in the hospital too. They dressed me in one of those funny back opening gowns, checked my heart, did a CT scan and a couple of x-rays as well as taking blood samples and then wheeled me off to an observation ward with lots of beds where they hooked me up to a drip. Maggie sat with me. Her poor friends, denied their promised posh meal, camped out in the waiting area of the hospital. Not long after they moved me to the Neurology ward to a room I was to share with Pepé. He was having a lot of trouble breathing and they had some machine pumping oxygen to his lungs. I would have found out more but my Spanish collapsed completely. I could not utter a single coherent sound and I was soon much more concerned about my Spanish than I was about whatever was supposed to be wrong with me.

I lay in my bed and every now and then someone would come and take my temperature, my blood pressure and check my blood sugar levels - there was even a 6am raid for some serious blood samples. The results and readings were always normal and, apart from a quite nasty headache, which still hasn't completely gone, and a general weakness when I started to try to move around I felt absolutely fine. In fact I began to feel a bit of a fraud. As I settled in, and as they let me exchange the gown for pyjamas, the food started to arrive - dinner, breakfast, no elevenses though, lunch, afternoon snack and back to dinner. The food wasn't great and they had a particularly tasteless line in soups cum gruels but I thought it was good that they fed me at all. The food and the constant stream of nurses, cleaners and auxiliaries were a break in the routine of lying there, trying to listen to a podcast that I found much, much harder than usual to understand. I finished my book, La uruguaya by Pedro Mairal but I was hard pressed to follow even the gist of the last few pages and as to understanding what the string of visitors were saying to Pepé's wife I had absolutely no idea. When I did utter a few words to try to be pleasant people would just stare at me blankly and uncomprehendingly. I soon limited myself to weak smiles and multilingual grunting.

Visitors can stay with people in Spanish hospitals all the time and there is probably an expectation that someone will be there to do a bit of the caring for a patient. Pepé's wife, Ana, stayed with him overnight and through the morning though someone, usually a daughter, came and took the midday shift so that Ana could go home and get changed and get something to eat. She was back by the early evening to take over again. Maggie came to see me and she would have stayed too but I shooed her away. I was able to feed myself, straighten the bed etc. and, when I was given the say so, go and get a shower. I saw absolutely no point in both of us being confined to barracks. The permission to get a shower came from a doctor who came to see me on Monday morning. You don't have a tumour, you didn't have a stroke, you don't have diabetes and it wasn't a heart attack so now we're going to do a resonancia. I supposed, though I never asked, that they were looking for signs of a fit or epilepsy. In the meantime, said the doctor, feel free to get out of bed, sit in the armchair and have a shower.

And that's what happened. No breakfast for me on Tuesday, en ayunas, fasting, and then off for an MRI scan. Into one of those tunnel things with quite a loud noise. I thought it would be horrid but, in the end, it was just boring. I asked how long it had taken when I came out and the answer was 25 minutes. About an hour later the doctor came to see me again. The resonancia found nothing, we can't find anything, all we can think is that it's your lifestyle - too much alcohol, to much smoking - so cut it out and be good. Now you can go home. I did flick to the last page of the medical report they gave me and it said not to drive for six months. I asked someone on the desk what this meant. It's all a recommendation she said and that's where we left it. Not being able to drive would be a serious blow for someone living in Culebrón.

They looked after me well. They came and got me in the first place. They treated me quickly. They found me a bed. They spent presumably large amounts of money on trying to find out what was wrong with me and they gave me food to eat, clean sheets and pyjamas to wear. I am so glad that I demanded legal contracts so many times from so many employers so I had a right to that healthcare.

Just as I was writing this I've been trying to decipher the medical report. Even if my Spanish were brilliant I don't think that I could understand it but it seems to cover all the things they said I didn't have. The big thing is that I had convulsions - Wikipedia equates those with epilepsy. Alcohol and tobacco use are also highlighted and the last line says chronic small vessel ischaemia (in Spanish) which Wikipedia tells me is basically a mini stroke. Maybe it's a bit belt and braces - we didn't find anything but it could have been any of these.

Well, at least this time. I got to blog about it.