“L’enfer, c’est les autres” or “Hell is other people” – Jean-Paul Sartre, (No Exit)

Don’t panic my tens of readers, I’m not going anywhere. I’m just leaving my thirties behind  and so I can’t really call this blog a “thirty-something’s guide to life for girls” anymore.  This is also because I’ve realised this isn’t really a “guide”, but more of me having an online outlet that I can colour in turquoise and use to vent my frequent frustrations about the things that get to us all, some of the time.

So, what is this evening’s topic, after my last supper of 39, which was chicken goujons (the thinking person’s nugget), chips and wine from a bottle that had been chilled for some weeks?  I thought I’d go back to the theme of asthma, because believe me, it keeps recurring  like a bad dream and I’ve had enough of it blighting my winters and making me feel at least double my age during the bad days, or when the steroids make me so sensitive (Moi?! Hyper emotional?) that I cry when someone, anyone, is nice to me.

Asthma has also given me some insight into hospitals, having visited The Chelsea & Westminster last week, where you sit in the same waiting room to see the respiratory consultant (appointment sought as I’m desperate for some clue about why asthma picks me off each winter), as the couples hoping for good news from the assisted reproduction unit, clutching boxes for contaminated sharps.

Anyway, back to Jersey.  Firstly, you have to get admitted. If you’re not sure how to spend your weekend, you could always visit your GP on Friday afternoon, have them pronounce your lungs “a mess” (fair comment) and get sent round to A&E for an X-Ray because you haven’t pressed your chest up against something firm for some time and a metal plate isn’t a bad place to start, all options considered.

Following triage during which a girl with a cat bite was seen ahead of me, I listed my cocktail of different coloured inhalers for the doctor, including the ones I had just paid £240 for in London, and we agreed that some nice IV antibiotics, plus even more steroids could do the trick.  Asked if I wanted to stay in, I said on balance I’d rather not (I had instant mash in the fridge and the TV can be good on a Friday). Still, it’s not often that a man asks me this question and when he said it was his medical advice that I remained in hospital and I realised I had two ID bracelets on my wrists, the deal was done.

It was fair to say that ED (as it prefers to be known), was at capacity last weekend.  I ended up sat in Resus where there was a spare trolley  for a bit, and you do see life. After being x-rayed, nebulised, cannulated, blood tested and ECG’d, I was given some strong antibiotics on a drip and moved on to the Emergency Admissions Unit later that night. And what an eye-opener that turned out to be.

As my Dad said, it was a sorry state of affairs, but if I was living in London I would likely be on a trolley in a corridor. Mum told me not to cry (you can’t beat a Yorkshire mother for the tough love), and was glad  she had brought my clean pyjamas so I didn’t bring shame on the family. And then I lay there, pretending that my big bag of fluids was an IV of gin and wouldn’t that be nice.

EAU is rather like New York, a city or rather a ward that NEVER SLEEPS.  Patients are arriving hourly over 24 hours and those are the ones I could see. Its nature is to get patients who need to stay in for brief assessment out of ED and potentially on to another ward.   However, that only works if the other wards have other beds.  I couldn’t call my insurers and beg for clemency due to the unfortunate words “pre-existing condition”, and even if I had been able to self-fund, there were, er, no private beds.

The medics and staff in ED and EAU do an astonishingly good job.  They never know who will come in, or when, or what their condition will be.  Whilst I was there, I saw them dealing with those who had fallen and were pregnant (not me, don’t worry), those who were very elderly and distressed, patients who had seizures and those of us who needed to start breathing properly again. We all needed our blood taken, our drugs given and observations done. The ward was clean, the food was good, and, if you had the right money, the League of Friends trolley could let you know that they had already sold the last copy of The Times despite you having the coins in your hand.

However, I defy anyone not to crack up under conditions where you have to witness the families of other patients sit round beds for up to 8 hours a day and listen to conversations that would make your hair curl.  Why can’t people just shut up and read a magazine for a bit, or at least look at the pictures and give the rest of us some peace?  I speak from experience and brushed up on Hello!, Look! and other literary treats when my friend E wasn’t talking me off the ceiling because my sense of humour failed in its tracks after witnessing a few too many bodily functions of others. “What do you expect?” asked the Sister on duty that afternoon when I got a bit distressed. “It’s a hospital.” I didn’t really have a response to that one.

Witness too a young woman in my bay of four patients, who  repeatedly enjoyed calling her boyfriend a “fanny”, telling her mum that she was “itching down there”, re-living the details of the incident that had brought her to hospital at least every half hour and receiving back her mother’s loud wisdom that “you don’t need to use soap down there, love, and you shouldn’t spray up inside yourself either, as women are self-cleaning.”  She belched at her boyfriend and all and sundry were treated loudly to the news that “she hadn’t had a sh*t since she had come in.”  And in the best news of all, it was now almost 10.00pm, and they were all going to come back at 8.00am the next morning to talk about it, all over again.  Oh, and they wanted to keep the digestive biscuits, thanks.

When I finally despaired and asked politely if we could now get some sleep, I was told to “do one” and informed that “It’s Saturday night, suck it up like the rest of us.”  I’m not sure quite what I was supposed to do or suck (!) and I’m sure she could have shown me, but there are limited actions one can take whilst on a drip and wearing a mask, unless you’re channelling Darth Vader. Oh, and her drip hurt. As someone once said to me, going into hosptial is a great leveller.  I had no control and at one point, literally no voice.  This will no doubt have been a relief to others around me.

Add to this charming tableau the use of one (clean) shared bathroom between two (mixed) four-bedded bays and it can’t be hard to see why patients are desperate to take their chances and get home if they can. I’m fine getting into a normal bath with a shower over the top, but not everyone is.  I managed two nights of this.  I’m not asking for a medal, but I hope that the staff who run these wards, the medics, the nurses, the healthcare assistants, the cleaners and the chefs, get the recognition that they deserve and a matron  or equivalent who can tell people to clear off before they bring everyone else down with them.

What I am asking, apart from us all to remember the manners we have, is that Jersey is brave and gets building its new hospital, soon. When you have been a patient; private, public (I’ve been both equally over the past four winters), and witnessed everything from abusive patients to end of life care in a six bedded unit, dingy “day rooms” and a hospital that doesn’t have a cafe you can go and sit in at the weekends for a bit of respite, you too are likely to lose your own patience.  Still, it frees up a bed.

Thank you for reading and here’s to the next forty years.