Manic March

If it was Fighting February then this is going to be Manic March.

New medication, new side effects.

Spent Monday afternoon travelling to and from Charing Cross Hospital to start dealing with the side effects. It all took so long I ended up on the rush hour tube, worn out. So, no music for me that night.

But March is also manic because it’s spring, a brand new year. Sparky, full of life; warm sunshine and light evenings. Fresh breezes and new dreams.

Then again, this Blog is three months old and I didn’t think it would be. March is not December, now it’s heads down for the long fight, the full 12 rounds, the rope-a-dope.

I hit 1000 in February and it was a big deal for me. 1000 hits is pretty good – it’s a local issue with limited appeal and I don’t have a big group of friends or relations to push it for me. I have distractions too.

I owe the 1000 to a small and obviously determined group of people.

Now I need to get more publicity, make more noise.

Mind you, on Sunday I was walking through the high street of a little town in Surrey and saw three people reading some posters about a certain hospital (no idea where they came from). Today I was boring people at Charing Cross Hospital and in the Nationwide in Hammersmith. I’ve become a plugger.

The ‘kindness of strangers’, that is what this is all about.

I’ve added a little history here for anyone new to the Blog, skip it if you’ve read it before;

I started Blogging on the fourth of December. I had been signed off by Orthopaedics a few days before – they did a really good job patching me up after my disgraceful treatment (check out my leaflet) by Accident and Emergency at St. Peter’s hospital, Chertsey. (The Ankle Rankle is my revenge).

What really got me angry was that the complaint I’d made was left lying about for 5 weeks after it had been written. When I put a complaint in to the Care Quality Commission, they contacted the Hospital and the report came out to me, almost immediately.

It was a whitewash. It recommended that the “Consultant” who messed up should have a period of “reflection”, and be responsible for training the Junior Doctors in how to recognise a broken ankle. Now, he is definitely not the person to be doing this.

The ‘report’ was written by a consultant in A and E – there are only four of them so I think they may know each other, I could be wrong there.

So, I started this Blog as a campaign for a better hospital – for the people who work there as much as for the patients.

It’s also a campaign to save the NHS, which means a lot to me as it does to so many people.

It’s also my way of embarrassing these people into changing. Long after I am gone, this Blog will stand as a monument to their failure, in a way that suing them never would – it just gets buried.

 

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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Contact:   neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com