Exhaust pipe needles

Dear reader, you of all people know that the last thing I wanted was to be rushed into hospital again, for whatever reason. But there I was again last week in the emergency ward of the OLVG, and don't tell anyone, but in my usual bed too. At least I was in a new ward afterwards, although Neurology is one of those departments that always sounded very vague, and nothing has happened to change my mind on that one.

I'm a fan of the OLVG as everyone knows but not a fan of some of the specialists and/or doctors. God help me, the female ones.

I don't know why it works like that but it does. 

The man in the bed next door to me was recovering from a craniotomy, that's skull surgery to you and me, and had a wound over half his head held together with stitches that would not have been out of place on Frankensteins monster. The doctor decided that he needed a lumbar puncture there and then, in bed, in a full ward. Now the man was obviously not completely 100% in our world and the insertion of what is laughingly referred to as the 'needle' didn't go as planned. Three times. 'Needle' my arse, its a fucking piece of steel as big as an exhaust pipe that they try to insert into your back without painkillers.

He of course screamed the place down, I had to leave the ward, there's just so much pain and suffering I can listen to. But not before I had heard the doctor reprimanding the patient that he wasn't being very helpful by responding in that way, and that if he didn't co-operate it would only take longer because she was determined that it would happen today.

This is the best hospital in the Netherlands. Still, doctors, specialists, surgeons treat patients like small petulant children.

Not all. Dear lord, no. There are wonderful people in the OLVG.

I'm just saying, once again, that although the powers that be try to represent our Health Care System as having no problems whatsoever, its not true.

In particular an Aids Machine that denies that patient care for Hiv+'ers falls short.

So long a hiv+'er stays within his or her own department (usually Internal Medicine) then they are usually treated with the utmost care by doctors, specialists and nurses who are worth their weight in gold. But if they stray to another department for whatever reason there are no guarantees.

On the Neurology ward I kept my Hiv Meds on the bedside trolley so that I could get at them easily. Visible to all. I don't see that as a problem, the only people who would know what they were, were other hiv+'ers and doctors. No big deal.

Yet nurses still referred to them in whispered tones as 'your other medication', and remembering to take them was my own responsibility, not theirs, that was made clear very early on.

Health.

Its a subjective opinion.

To me its one thing, to you another.

But to a health care professional it means a completely different thing.

Finding the median between the two (three) is something we all need to work on.

But do we all want to?