It's been a frustrating day. Got a phone call late this morning to say that there is a last minute appointment available for my preassessment clinic appointment at Nottingham. Can I get there for 8.30am tomorrow morning? I reply that I can if I can get the hospital transport booked. It's too early for a train, H is still recovering from his biopsy, and there is no one else to take me. Community transport doesn't go outside the county.
I ring the hospital transport, usual 30 minutes in the queue. I've been through the qualifying procedure before, for when I went to the sarcoma unit at Birmingham last month. Unfortunately I'm only showing as OK for transport to Birmingham on the system. I explain that my care has been transferred to Nottingham, as it's a shorter journey for me. But I still have to get reassessed. That finally gets done and they take the booking, but they can't confirm it yet as I've rung at short notice and they've already begun tomorrow's driver allocations. I'm to ring back later for confirmation.
I update the hospital and they say they'll assume that the transport gets confirmed and carry on with the arrangements their end for the various procedures I need. I'll be having another MRI scan done and they book that for 11.30am.
I have to chase the transport a couple of times this afternoon, but finally I'm told everything is fine and the driver will pick me up at 6.30am tomorrow morning.
Then I get a call from the hospital to say that they have had to cancel my appointment tomorrow as my slot is now needed for an emergency. Seems that as I was the last patient booked into the clinic that I'm the one to get bumped. The secretary who rang was very apologetic. I felt sorry for her, she sounded stressed and I got the feeling she'd been spending most of her day dealing with situations like this.
So I'm now booked for the clinic and MRI next Friday instead. I then spent 30 minutes back in the transport queue to cancel and rebook tomorrow's trip. I apologised to the call handler for the late cancellation, she sighed and said most of this afternoon calls were due to appointments being rearranged, it's how thing are.
I am trying to be understanding as I'm sure it must be a logistical nightmare trying to juggle all the things going on behind the scenes to deal with the complexity of a cancer patient's treatment plan. However I'm now the closest I've come to tears since my cancer diagnosis.
