Day 90: My surgery at Fastrack Hospital was successful. It took place six weeks after my GP suspected something. Compare that length of time to the Department of Health's target of 18 weeks. The mind boggles at the discrepancy.
So, when doctors and hospital managers grumble at the tyranny of targets, point out that anything much more than my six weeks should not be acceptable. Meanwhile, I am grateful for being in a different universe to most of my contemporaries, who seem to suffer from the 18 week norm.
However, I am not out of the woods entirely, as my wound has become infected. After starting a course of antibiotic tablets, I idly looked at the small print about drug interactions and found that a drug for gout (don't laugh) that I had been taking for years clashed with the antibiotic. I don't really blame the doctor who prescribed the antibiotic, because for years, I have wondered how on earth doctors could hold in their heads the myriad contraindications that all drugs have.
I rang the hospital pharmacist who assured me that the risks in this case were minimal. Fine, but he worried me, when he explained he was looking the interaction up in a book. A BOOK, I thought to myself. How quaint. Checking one drug against another and updating the database continually had to be a job for computers, not books.
How often, I asked myself, would such a tome be published? Twice a year I guess, while it's possible that hundreds of clashes are found every week. And doctors who think they can safely prescribe drugs without a database check are dangerously deluded.
Checking around, I found that there is loads of drug-checking software on the market. One system attracted my eye, an American package called Epocrates, because of its mode of delivery. It runs on iPhones and BlackBerries. So doctors can do the checks at the bedside. I was grumbling last time that doctors and nurses still do not use handhelds. This drug-checking thing is a perfect app for hand-helds.
I find that some UK health trusts are rolling out drug-checking, but precious few. Why not more, or even a national roll-out? It is such an obvious thing to do, to cut some of the thousands of patient deaths from "inappropriate medication". The bleeding obvious, sadly, does not impinge very often on the Department of Health.
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