My partner John has now been in hospital for 18 days. He first went into Resuscitation for two days - after I called for an ambulance. The morning after a hotel stay, after we arrived too late to get a taxi home from a nearby town, he (a T1 diabetic) became unresponsive. He had been showing signs of blood sugar problems for a while but there was nothing I could do and he seemed unable to test himself. I have to say the paramedics as well as the hotel staff at the Travelodge were amazing.
Once out of resuscitation he went into the Intensive Care Unit where a fantastic team brought down his dangerously high blood sugar; brought down his high blood pressure (high blood pressure is something very new to him), and informed me casually that he also had covid (we had just returned from a 2-week holiday together, and our return home was plagued with a heavy travel schedule that turned out to be too much for both of us for various health-related reasons)
When - all masked up and covered in blue paper and gloves - I finally got to see John, he didn't recognise me, was thrashing around, trying to pull off the oxygen mask and all the other plastic bits and pieces; didn't know where he was and was talking in tongues. The next time I visited, he recognised me and I was relieved to find that he was not brain-damaged. Soon he was almost back to normal. Then my predictions about moving to a new ward proved true and I received the phone call to say he was on the move.
When I turned up to visit the new ward (on my last legs and gasping due to a mile hike to the ward) I was turned away. It turned out the ward was a covid ward; I was informed it also had norovirus and was closed. Luckily I was allowed to leave a heavy bag of clothes, etc, that I thought he would soon need, and I went home to wait until the ward opened to visitors. Naturally, I was fuming that they had put an 80-year-old diabetic man into a ward where there were not one but two viruses. From that day, his health, such as it was, went downhill.
He had lost weight and strength; he developed a really bad cough, which I know is a covid symptom but in the ICU he had been symptomless. Over the space of two weeks due to the inability to eat, he has lost three and a half stones. Nevertheless, after so long in hospital, this week he was expecting to be sent home, but two days ago his hopes were dashed when he was told he couldn't because his standing blood pressure was too low. It was, in fact dangerously low. Blood pressure hasn't been an issue in the past.
The nursing staff appears very young and inexperienced. They seem to have been taught how to test blood pressure, blood sugar, and all those things that require electronic devices, but nothing else. There is a young man there who hasn't a clue how to get a patient from sitting on the bed to sitting on the chair and I've never heard any of them ask a patient how they are feeling and the man in the next bed got no attention when he woke up.
They are following a very slow, inefficient routine - in and out of the various bays - interspersed with long spells around the desk learning how to work the phones, showing very little interest in whether John drinks enough fluids or gets any exercise, treating every patient as routine, wandering in and out of the bay without any degree of organisation. The same goes for the delivery of food etc. On one occasion my partner's lunch was removed from his table when he visited the bathroom. He's diabetic and had to wait until dinner without anything to sustain him. Yesterday when I asked about his dinner, I was told "It's being cooked". That must be a standard reply because it was on the trolley with one other. Had I not been there, at some point, he would have got a cold dinner. When he started to feel dizzy, he would never have received the medical help he needed if I hadn't been there to go up to the desk.
The ward is very warm. You can definitely feel the difference when the porter pushes my wheelchair out into the corridor (yes, I finally got help) and I don't think John realises how cold it has become. The main way of heating our home is with our log burner and an air-to-air pump. I am not using the log burner because I'm not supposed to lift anything or do the bending required to clear away the ash. It's warm enough for me but he was cold before we went abroad in mid-November, and he thinks he will be able to bring logs in and light the fire when he comes home. At the moment he cannot even stand up! He cannot climb the stairs and there is no bed and no room for a bed downstairs. What can I do? Sorry this is so long.
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