Baby boy joy for brain op soccer star
Machine blunder leaves people waiting until New Year
Ryan Mason FOOTBALLER Ryan Mason is celebrating becoming a dad, 11 months after suffering a near-fatal head injury.
The Hull City player’s fiancee Rachel Peters shared a photo of their first-born on Instagram, writing: “Welcome to the world baby boy you’ve made all our dreams come true.”
Ryan, 26, fractured his skull in a collision with Chelsea’s Gary Cahill at Stamford Bridge in January and has still to return to first team action.
He spent eight days in hospital following surgery for a bleed on the brain. After being released he slept for up to 20 hours a day for the first five weeks.
He is to have a scan in January to see if the skull has fused and hopes to be playing again in two months. A pal said: “The baby is the best news ever for Ryan and Rachel.” University Hospital Waterford HEART patients are going to have to spend two weeks of Christmas in hospital waiting for life-saving procedures that take just an hour to perform.
In the latest blunder to hit University Hospital Waterford, the cath lab has been shut for the past few days after vital machinery broke down for the second time this year.
High-risk patients are now trapped in the hospital deadlock until 2018, hanging on for urgent angiograms and hoping they do not have a heart attack before then.
Patient Liz Murphy told the Irish Daily Mirror: “I failed the heart stress test and I still had to wait 10 days to get the two stents I needed put it.”
The hospital had 34 patients on trolleys yesterday, but some of these could be treated and sent home quickly.
Liz said: “I was 35 hours on a trolley when I first went into A&E and then I got a bed for the rest of the 10 days.”
Liz is a type one diabetic and was deemed an urgent case because she was at risk of suffering a heart attack.
After the cath lab was forced to close, the waiting time for patients already there has increased to two weeks.
They can make the dangerous decision to leave hospital and hold out for an outpatient’s appointment, but this takes three months.
Liz said: “No one can take that chance, so you just have to sit in there and wait.”
This scandal comes exactly six months since Tom Power died in the back of an ambulance after suffering heart failure.
The cath lab at UHW was closed when he was admitted on a Sunday and had to be dashed to Cork University Hospital.
Campaigner for 24-hour cardiac care in the South-east Hilary O’neill said: “A mobile cath lab was brought to Waterford in September, but it can only perform diagnostic tests. Anyone who is in there now is going to be in there for all of Christmas and afterwards waiting for treatment that they have already been told they need.”
CARDIAC PATIENT
No one can take that chance so you have to sit in there and wait
LIZ MURPHY