Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Mortality in sharp focus after mum’s hospital trip ordeal
Melissa Todd is forced to don PPE and take on the role of nurse as her sick mother waits for hours on a stretcher in an understaffed, overstretched ward...
We will give you some medicine, the lovely doctor said, and make you well. “Oh will you?” my mum cried, her face splitting into a huge grin. “Will it be the ‘make Jan better’ medicine?” I mustn’t cry, I thought. I mustn’t cry, or I won’t stop, and I have to be strong, because everyone needs me to be strong.
My mum has suffered Crohn’s for 15 years, and this was the worst bout we’d seen. Her weight had dropped to five stone; her body had ceased responding to the medication. Crohn’s is a vicious, duplicitous, undignified illness, turning the body against itself, rendering eating impossible. She was dehydrated, exhausted, barely able to stand.
I’d called her an ambulance, and while the crew was treating her a woman knocked on the window and asked if they would move out of her way, as she would otherwise be late for work. The paramedic, who was only about 25, glared at her.
“No. You are going to be late for work.”
She tutted and stomped off and I hoped she would break her leg.
At QEQM we had to wait outside because there was no room for my mum, even in the corridor. The ambulance crew had to wait with her because she was on their only stretcher, and the hospital had no stretchers, still less beds. Gradually we crept indoors and snaked through the system. We got there at noon and I left her about 10pm, still with no bed, lying in the middle of a ward on a stretcher. I stood beside her, in everyone’s way, helpless. Two staff members were needed to change my mum but we could only find one, a young man whose name badge said Taco. He is gentle and sympathetic with my mum, though, thoughtful of her dignity. He struggles to take her bra off (“Can’t understand how work!”) and looks sheepish at his incompetence, so I rush to do it. In the absence of nurses he gives me an apron and gloves so I can attempt to help with the rest. She screams. She’s amassofsores.iripoffmy PPE when we’re done in case any other patients expect help, because I’m squeamish and clumsy. They do anyway. I’m asked to fetch water, scratch backs, close curtains, find lip balms and phone numbers. Across the ward a young woman, handcuffed to her bed, screams abuse at a policeman, so visceral and vibrant I feel she could have enjoyed a career in the arts, if only life had been kinder.
We hold hands, in among the wires and butterfly drips, and wait to be noticed. And she whispers “I am too young just to go to sleep forever!” And she is. If it weren’t for Crohn’s she’d be absolutely fine. But they’ve run out of options to treat it. So she’s in hospital, on a stretcher, on a drip, having her symptoms treated, but no closer to finding an actual treatment, and I’m in London today, earning a living, after a long strip-lit day and night, because bills don’t stop coming, irrespective of anything else we must endure.
And it occurred to me how we all have a death story waiting for us, just as we all have a story of our birth, first day at school, first kiss, first job, and how much it matters, that legacy, those stories, and how completely out of our control they are.