There are times when hospital is no place for a sick man
THIS WOMAN’S LIFE
LAST week when I was on my way to Ledbury in Herefordshire to give a reading, the news filtered through that my son-in-law Pat Mackey had been taken to hospital by ambulance at 7.30am. The news disturbed me a lot. Pat is 45 years old and he has terminal cancer. Normally some of the brilliant and kind palliative care team come to his house and give him pain relief and help him overcome bouts of nausea. So I was thinking that he must be really much worse if he had to go to the hospital.
Should I turn back? I haven’t boarded my flight yet. I still have time to email the UK festival and cancel.
But I was advised not to cancel — that everything was going to be all right. Pat was in Galway’s Accident and Emergency Department and he would soon be seen to. Or as they say in Connemara, Ni mar a shiltear a bhitear (Things are never as they seem).
When I got home from Ledbury, which is a beautiful market town three trains and a shuttle away from Birmingham airport, I learned a few things about Pat’s time in A&E in Galway’s University College Hospital. Firstly he was half the day on the trolley in a very busy corridor before being moved to a cubicle. He was admitted by ambulance because of severe pain and an overwhelming feeling of weakness all over.
A nurse in A&E asked his wife, my daughter Heather, if she could find him some pain relief as they were not in a position to give him as much as a disprin until he was seen by someone from oncology. Heather went out and got over-the-counter painkillers from the chemist shop across the road.
Finally, after waiting 12 hours in A&E, Pat got a bed in St Enda’s ward.
There is a beautiful new oncology ward in Galway but Pat could not get in there yet. The hope was that he would be transferred there as an in-house chemo patient — but if he went home he would miss his place and have to wait six weeks to get into this oncology suite.
So to St Enda’s, a long ward with an even longer history. I referred to it in a previous column as The Gulag. The last time Pat was there, a few months ago, he was very weak and unable to walk to the toilet. He asked for a urine bottle which was given to him. The only problem was it was still there two days later, full to overflowing.
This ward is truly abysmal. It is a general medical ward like the rest, but this one in particular is used for psychiatric patients who are sent over from the psych ward; they have medical issues as well as mental health issues. That has nothing to do with it being abysmal. The men have to use the women’s showers in St Enda’s because the men’s shower is used as a store room. So very often as a woman is coming out of the shower a man is going in.
Some of the patients from the psychiatric unit have one-to-one security guards sitting beside their beds. It is more reminiscent of a scene from Chekhov’s Ward No 6 than a scene from a hospital ward in 2017. It is survival of the fittest in St Enda’s ward and if you have stage-four cancer like Pat and you don’t sit up quickly and eat your dinner when it arrives, another patient will rock up and eat it without your permission, in jig time. The practice of other people eating your food also applied when my husband was in St Enda’s in 2010. A confused patient often tried to get into his bed. You sleep with one eye open in St Enda’s ward or not at all.
On another day Pat was feeling particularly unwell. Heather had to keep changing his T-shirt as he was perspiring profusely. He could have had an infection, he could have had sepsis, and there was no one to help him but his wife. Yet when she was coming back in after collecting her son the staff nurse said it is not visiting time. You can only come in here during visiting times. The same day a blood test was requested at 9.40am: that blood test didn’t happen until 7pm.
Today, Pat was seven days in St Enda’s with no privacy and living in absolute fear with security guards sitting around the place. He could take it no longer; he was very distressed as there was no sign that he was going to be moved to oncology.
He was given a calendar year to live last November by his oncologist. Pat is dying. When my daughter called up to him today after collecting their son Oisin, Pat had his few things packed and said that he wasn’t being looked after and he wanted to go home.
In Galway’s so-called cancer centre of excellence a dying man became invisible. He had no relative, a surgeon or doctor, who might get him into oncology a little quicker. He became like the character in Kafka’s short story, The Fasting Artist, who was just swept out with the straw from the cage in the end. He was invisible and unimportant, nobody cared.
As they were on the way home, a nurse from bed management rang. Heather wanted to know why, after a week, Pat was still in that ward instead of the oncology ward. The nurse’s exact words were: “He just wasn’t a priority.” He is at home now, hurt, dejected and he feels completely let down by the so-called cancer centre of excellence.
Pat left school early and through an access course did a science degree in NUIG and he excelled with eight straight As. Before that he was a roofer.