We battled our own crisis in heart care

LAST month, the Mail’s Colin Fernandez reported on ‘the worst heart care crisis in living memory’. This is my story of trying to cope with my husband Peter’s heart troubles. It all began with a pain in his chest. He was due to have a cardiac X-ray at the hospital — then Covid arrived and everything came to a standstill. It was all e-consultations.

Peter requested help, but the only response was advice for him to take more tablets. There was no thought that he might have a serious heart condition. It seemed impossible to see a GP, no matter how hard we tried. Eventually, I did manage it, but it took tears and a lot of time hanging around the GP surgery before I could tell someone about Peter.

He was put on a waiting list to see a cardiac specialist, who confirmed he had problems. But then he had to wait four months for the next step: a cardiac CT scan. This was done on a Friday; on the following Sunday night he got a phone call from a locum cardiac registrar at the hospital, telling him to come in immediately.

The next day, a cardiac angiogram showed an issue with his aortic valve. He also had four severely blocked arteries around his heart and a critical lesion in the left main stem.

But as he was not actually having a heart attack, I was asked to take him home until the inevitable happened. At that point he would be considered an emergency, which would send him to the top of a waiting list.

I refused to take him home, as there were ambulance strikes and I couldn’t imagine having to run that gauntlet. Eventually, Peter was operated on. In addition to the cardiac surgery, he suffered kidney impairment and a suspected stroke. But when he was discharged from hospital a week later, we were just left to get on with things. We didn’t know who should help with his post-operative care. I was phoning our GP surgery endlessly, trying to get answers. I felt he had been abandoned. Six weeks passed and finally Peter was ‘picked up’ by a cardiac rehab team. He should have been called back to the hospital about seven weeks after surgery, but this did not happen. When I phoned three months later, they were most apologetic, and he was finally seen by a locum consultant cardiac surgeon, who signed him off.

This year, I created a large artwork to express how I felt about the trauma we had been through, incorporating headlines and stories from the Mail. It is entitled Dark Journey Through Present-Day People’s Health Service, and is reproduced above. Thankfully, Peter is now doing well.