We've had a difficult 3 months. The pain in Pat's shoulder had been getting increasingly worse, excruciating at times, he's had a low grade fever for weeks, night sweats and irregular blood results but our consultant has been dragging his feet and has not been on top of Pat's case. When a liver biopsy came back clear he said he was "quite optomisic" but we knew better and our certainty that this was cancer related was right.
Our GP, who is fantastic, was increasingly worried that nothing was being done to get to the bottom of Pat's symptoms so last Wed had Pat admitted to the Infectious Disease ward (ruling out an infection seemed a good start). The team on the ward was great, they discovered Pat was very anemic so he's had a blood transfusion and they ordered a CT scan which has shown up secondary bone cancer on his left ribs. They jumped into action to sort out a management plan for Pat's pain and last night he has his first good nights sleep for 3 months!
I don't like moaning about the NHS as generally we have had good care from them, but what was the consultant doing? If our GP could see a problem and we ourselves knew there was something massively wrong why didn't he admit Pat to hospital 2 weeks ago when we met with him to discuss all these symptoms? We left the meeting feeling frustrated and scared. Thank goodness for our fabulous GP who stepped in to do the consultant's job!
Enough ranting. We are back on track now and waiting for more detail and a treatment plan to be worked out. The multidisciplinary team meet on Tuesday so I expect we will hear more after that. In the meantime Pat's in hospital and looking forward to coming home with his morphine!!!
