Experience

“I don’t operate on people like that.”

I had no obvious way to seek redress, and let the incident pass. When I moved my mother to a small residential home in Coventry specialising in Alzheimer’s disease, I arranged to see a Coventry gynaecologist. After some persuasion he agreed to operate on my mother, on the understanding that I was aware she might not survive the anaesthetic and that the family would have to attend her in hospital as the nurses could not cope with a patient who was so dependent. We took her into the operating theatre ante-room and transferred her on to the theatre trolley, while the hospital staff stood aside ignoring her. The operation was a success, although she was bruised from falling off the trolley in the operating theatre. She was discharged back to the residential home within 24 hours.

While my mother still lived in Rugby, she needed dental attention.  As she could not understand or follow instructions, the Community Dental Service  would not perform fillings as they had no procedure for filling teeth using general anaesthetic.  Later she had general anaesthetic for dental surgery, but by that stage she needed all her teeth extracted.  After that she could only eat mushy food.

Later my mother broke her hip and was admitted to hospital in Coventry. On a hot July Saturday she was prepared for surgery, without food or liquids. On a visit to the ward in the evening, I found that the operation had been postponed because the theatre was over-worked, but my mother, who weighed only six stones, had been left without sustenance and lying in pain on the broken hip. I thought she had been quietly left there to die. I insisted on speaking to a surgeon, and spoke to a Registrar over the telephone. He would not assure me that the operation would be carried out the next day. I retorted that, barring an air crash over Coventry, I expected my mother’s operation to be the following morning, which was a Sunday. The operation, a “garden screw” joining together two crumbling pieces of bone, was performed early next morning. The following Friday BBC Midlands Today reported another elderly patient waiting three days in Coventry Hospital for hip surgery. I wrote to the reporter, and spoke the following week on local radio. One thing I said was that I suspected the hospital had a policy of euthanasia. This prediction has echoes in more recent revelations at other hospitals.

The “garden screw” repair to the hip came apart quickly, and eventually my mother was readmitted to hospital for tests. The Consultant gave a grudging bedside interview, standing with his back to us. He asserted wrongly that my mother could not feel pain, and said he would not operate on a patient who was incapable of co-operating with treatment. Still he kept my mother immobile in hospital for six weeks. Eventually a Birmingham surgeon agreed to operate, provided that I accepted the risk that my mother might die under anaesthetic. The operation was a partial success. My mother was out of pain, but could not walk without assistance. She survived another ten months. I am convinced she would have lived longer if the hip replacement had not been delayed.

When I drew attention to management failings, the management took appropriate action. But the consultant surgeon who intended to send my mother home with a permanently broken hip would not even look me in the eye.

She was kept inactive by drugs that have in March 2007 been shown to cause premature deaths.

The way my mother was neglected reminded me of my own treatment when I had breast cancer. In 1990 my General Practitioner sent me to see a consultant surgeon specialising in breast cancer to investigate breast lumps. He performed a simple test, said the lumps were cysts and not cancerous, and removed the liquid. Subsequent press reports showed that this test was still in routine use in the NHS years later and long after it had been discredited abroad.  [Even in 2006 breast cancer tests are not reliable enough.]

The lumps grew and I was sent back again. The same consultant was contemptuous and said he did not want to see me again. Three years later I was called for the routine screening of women aged between 50 and 65. At first I thought I had been subjected to enough ridicule, and I missed the first appointment. The village surgery sent me a reminder, and on this occasion I decided not to be intimidated and I went for screening. When the scan was positive, I saw the same consultant. He told me there was a very small cancerous growth and arranged for me to be admitted to Rugby Hospital for surgery after my Easter holiday. The first operation did not remove enough cancerous tissue, and I was readmitted to hospital and had a second operation a fortnight later. The laboratory report showed that the cancer had already spread beyond my breast. Then I was fortunate to come under the care of a consultant cancer specialist who was positive and did inspire confidence. He took me through ten months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and five years of Tamoxifen hormone treatment, and I seem now to be fully recovered.