Sunday 23rd May 2010
As some of you will know through chat, John's chemo was cancelled last Friday because the pharmacy had run out of the drug he needed (the trial part). We didn't find out until we turned up at Ward 10 so you can imagine how upset we both were. John gets himself in a terrible state on the days leading up to treatment and it was all for nothing!
The Head Pharmacist did come up to apologise, saying that it had happened on her day off. There are apparently signs all around the Pharmacy warning people to order more drugs when they take the last one, but apparently this didn't happen. I told her that we used to get it in the neck when we ran out of stationery in the office, let alone life saving drugs!
We haven't had a very good experience with this Pharmacy in any case. Time and again there have been queries on prescriptions written by doctors and we have had to wait lengthy periods of time until they got it sorted out. John went there one day to pick something up and they even had the nerve to send him up to the ward to sort it out himself and it's quite some distance away from Ward 10. As if he hasn't got enough to worry about without having to chase up his own drugs.
The truth of it is that they (the hospital) don't really want to prescribe drugs. The Consultant said that his own GP could prescribe them for him but, seeing as the hospital don't actually keep the GP informed, I don't see how his GP can prescribe drugs he knows nothing about! I told the Consultant this but it remains to be seen whether anything is done.
Not very impressed with our local surgery either. John woke up on Thursday morning with very sore groins which is probably another nasty side effect of the chemo. Phone Ward 10 and they referred us to our surgery. Phone them at 10am and they promised to get a district nurse to phone us back. At 2pm I phone them because we had heard nothing and the nurse didn't come out until 5pm that evening, only to tell us to buy Sudacream to put on it and use a mild soap - couldn't someone have told us that over the phone for goodness sake?
Any way, after the fiasco on Friday we'd decided to make the best of it and have a day out at Exbury Gardens today because we figured that John might be feeling a little better without the chemo drugs. How wrong can you be?
The poor love felt dreadful when he got up this morning so our lovely day out has been cancelled.
And so Life (if you can call it that) goes on!
