Today I find myself sitting at work surrounded by a dense fog of gloom. This morning at 9:30 I was due to see my Surgeon for the first time and hopefully be given a date for my operation. However, as seems to have been the rule so far during the course of my illness, I returned from work last night and discovered two messages on my answer phone from my surgeons secretary informing me that the appointment would have to be cancelled. Apparently an emergency had arisen that afternoon and so the clinic would need to be cancelled.
Working in the Hospital I am well aware that emergencies will occur just when you least want them to and that the poor buggers who are suffering the emergency would rather not be, thank you very much. Emergencies, of course, should always take priority but boy did it take the wind out of my sails when I heard the news. Never mind I thought, at least it means Gill and I can pop open a bottle of fizz on Valentines Day and I’ll phone in the morning to get the next available appointment.
Fast forward to 2:30 this morning and I find myself lying in bed with my mind working overtime: What if they won’t be able to rearrange my appointment for later in the week? What if the emergency involved the surgeon and he is going to be unavailable for months? What if the surgeon just had to take his kids to school that morning and so cancelled his early appointments? What if the surgeon wanted to wait until Michael Barrymore had agreed to assist him during the operation? All these and many more even more far fetched notions kept me awake until the alarm went off at 6:45. Thus suitably refreshed I headed to work with a growing dread of my phone call to the surgeons secretary and the determination not to throw a hissy fit if I didn’t satisfaction.
Once at work I logged on to the PAS network which lists clinics and the patients attending them just to allay my fears that I had been the only patient cancelled. As it happens I was still down as an active patient for the clinic as were the other 4 people listed so now I was unsure as to whether the clinic had been cancelled or not. Only one thing to do: phone the secretary and find out what was going on. The first thing she said was that, yes, the clinic was indeed cancelled due to an emergency patient requiring surgery, fair enough. However she then went on to say that Mr Hasan only does one adult clinic a fortnight and the next available slot wasn’t until the 15th of March, a whole month away!
I don’t think she could tell that this had not gone down well; at worst I had assumed I might have to wait a further week or so. She took my stunned silence as an acceptance of the situation and proceeded to tell me that an appointment would be sent out in the post to me. I recovered enough to ask her to repeat what she had just told me and sure enough I had heard correctly. I was still stunned and although I asked why I couldn’t be put into the next clinic on the 1st of March I wasn’t alert enough to ask why one of those patients couldn’t be moved back a week when told that the clinic was “...Fully, in fact, over booked”. In something of a stupor I think I mumbled some thanks for her help and put the phone down. Another month! I’ve barely made it on a day to day basis up to this point, running on basic life support, never mind having to find the resolve to last for another 4 weeks.
After providing me with a cup of tea to try and get some life into me Jan suggested that I take a look on PAS to see if I had been allocated a time yet. Calling the clinic up I entered today’s date by mistake and had to shuffle through the clinics until reaching the listing for the 15th. As I passed the clinic for the 1st I happened to notice that there were only 3 slots allocated for that clinic which didn’t strike me as being either fully or over booked. Right I thought, if the secretary hasn’t yet entered any appointments into the remaining slots perhaps I could ask her to look kindly on a fellow hospital worker and slip me in.
I should have known better. Telling her that I had noticed only three appointments booked for the clinic on the 1st she rather icily informed me that Mr Hasan would only see three new patients per clinic and as she had stated previously the slots were fully booked. I apologised and said that as there had been 5 slots on the list for this week’s clinic I had assumed, wrongly apparently, that each clinic could accommodate that number. She took this opportunity to accuse me of checking up on her and calling her a liar. This is not at all what I had expected and was lost for words as she continued by suggesting that I might even have been checking other patients’ details! That was the comment that broke the spell...How dare she?
I explained, in as calm a voice as I could summon at this stage, that that was a very dangerous accusation to be making about a fellow professional and she had better qualify her comments or withdraw them. She spluttered around the subject and added that I needed to understand that every patient that comes to the clinic is concerned with their condition not just you. This was going from bad to worse faster than a UFO band reunion and I could tell that the situation was irretrievably lost. I just told her to get the appointment in the post and thanked her for the help she had given me before putting the phone down. So I now think I have an enemy for life and just wonder what surprises she is going to have in store for me. I found out later after she reported me for ‘improper use of PAS’ which, sensibly, has been investigated, found not to be the case, has been dropped and is going no further. How nice.
So here I sit stewing in my own frustration at the continued wait to see the surgeon, anger at how poorly I reacted on the phone and despair at the thought I could have inadvertently soured my relationship with my surgeon despite never even talking to him!. My boss is going to try and see if he can get things pushed forward but agrees that things don’t look too promising. Four more weeks and a non too friendly secretary who has no doubt had a word with her scalpel wielding boss, great. I’m looking forward to this with even less relish than I was previously.
Working in the Hospital I am well aware that emergencies will occur just when you least want them to and that the poor buggers who are suffering the emergency would rather not be, thank you very much. Emergencies, of course, should always take priority but boy did it take the wind out of my sails when I heard the news. Never mind I thought, at least it means Gill and I can pop open a bottle of fizz on Valentines Day and I’ll phone in the morning to get the next available appointment.
Fast forward to 2:30 this morning and I find myself lying in bed with my mind working overtime: What if they won’t be able to rearrange my appointment for later in the week? What if the emergency involved the surgeon and he is going to be unavailable for months? What if the surgeon just had to take his kids to school that morning and so cancelled his early appointments? What if the surgeon wanted to wait until Michael Barrymore had agreed to assist him during the operation? All these and many more even more far fetched notions kept me awake until the alarm went off at 6:45. Thus suitably refreshed I headed to work with a growing dread of my phone call to the surgeons secretary and the determination not to throw a hissy fit if I didn’t satisfaction.
Once at work I logged on to the PAS network which lists clinics and the patients attending them just to allay my fears that I had been the only patient cancelled. As it happens I was still down as an active patient for the clinic as were the other 4 people listed so now I was unsure as to whether the clinic had been cancelled or not. Only one thing to do: phone the secretary and find out what was going on. The first thing she said was that, yes, the clinic was indeed cancelled due to an emergency patient requiring surgery, fair enough. However she then went on to say that Mr Hasan only does one adult clinic a fortnight and the next available slot wasn’t until the 15th of March, a whole month away!
I don’t think she could tell that this had not gone down well; at worst I had assumed I might have to wait a further week or so. She took my stunned silence as an acceptance of the situation and proceeded to tell me that an appointment would be sent out in the post to me. I recovered enough to ask her to repeat what she had just told me and sure enough I had heard correctly. I was still stunned and although I asked why I couldn’t be put into the next clinic on the 1st of March I wasn’t alert enough to ask why one of those patients couldn’t be moved back a week when told that the clinic was “...Fully, in fact, over booked”. In something of a stupor I think I mumbled some thanks for her help and put the phone down. Another month! I’ve barely made it on a day to day basis up to this point, running on basic life support, never mind having to find the resolve to last for another 4 weeks.
After providing me with a cup of tea to try and get some life into me Jan suggested that I take a look on PAS to see if I had been allocated a time yet. Calling the clinic up I entered today’s date by mistake and had to shuffle through the clinics until reaching the listing for the 15th. As I passed the clinic for the 1st I happened to notice that there were only 3 slots allocated for that clinic which didn’t strike me as being either fully or over booked. Right I thought, if the secretary hasn’t yet entered any appointments into the remaining slots perhaps I could ask her to look kindly on a fellow hospital worker and slip me in.
I should have known better. Telling her that I had noticed only three appointments booked for the clinic on the 1st she rather icily informed me that Mr Hasan would only see three new patients per clinic and as she had stated previously the slots were fully booked. I apologised and said that as there had been 5 slots on the list for this week’s clinic I had assumed, wrongly apparently, that each clinic could accommodate that number. She took this opportunity to accuse me of checking up on her and calling her a liar. This is not at all what I had expected and was lost for words as she continued by suggesting that I might even have been checking other patients’ details! That was the comment that broke the spell...How dare she?
I explained, in as calm a voice as I could summon at this stage, that that was a very dangerous accusation to be making about a fellow professional and she had better qualify her comments or withdraw them. She spluttered around the subject and added that I needed to understand that every patient that comes to the clinic is concerned with their condition not just you. This was going from bad to worse faster than a UFO band reunion and I could tell that the situation was irretrievably lost. I just told her to get the appointment in the post and thanked her for the help she had given me before putting the phone down. So I now think I have an enemy for life and just wonder what surprises she is going to have in store for me. I found out later after she reported me for ‘improper use of PAS’ which, sensibly, has been investigated, found not to be the case, has been dropped and is going no further. How nice.
So here I sit stewing in my own frustration at the continued wait to see the surgeon, anger at how poorly I reacted on the phone and despair at the thought I could have inadvertently soured my relationship with my surgeon despite never even talking to him!. My boss is going to try and see if he can get things pushed forward but agrees that things don’t look too promising. Four more weeks and a non too friendly secretary who has no doubt had a word with her scalpel wielding boss, great. I’m looking forward to this with even less relish than I was previously.
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