GrumpyDaddy

I wrote recently about how I wasn't well at the moment and some of the rather unpleasant procedures I've undergone to get to the bottom¹ of whatever is wrong with me.

If you remember I had two tests lined up. I've been very nervous about these tests, more because I've been scared of what they might find. Partly because I tend to worry about such things anyway and also because a stupid GP scared the Bejaysus² out of me.

Well the experience of the first test was fine. As fine as being fed feet first into a giant radioactive doughnut can be anyway. We can save on electricity bills now as I'll glow in the dark for a year or so. In the week since the CT scan I'd not heard from my GP or consultant and took that to mean "no news is good news". After all if they'd found anything in there they'd have called me, right?³.

I've not enjoyed the latter half of 2011 thanks to a lingering illness. What's wrong with me? My guess is something as simple as kidney stones, but it has been a tough few months that has seen me at times feeling a-okay and other times in pain and having to take to my bed.

The months have been frustrating and scary too thanks to the inibility of various general practicioners to prescribe a coherent treatment regime. I've seen four different GPs over the last few months and this has not been entirely satisfactory - from one locum who felt she'd tell me it could be cancer (but then did nothing at all to help in this regard) to another who told me my symptoms couldn't be kidney stones (the whole internet and a consultant urologist say he's wrong).

The truth is I'm fed up with the whole thing. Fed up with being unwell for months on end and fed up of dealing wih an organisation - the NHS - I don't have great faith in. And as we'll come to later - I'm coming to some embarrasing conclusions about my general health and my own culpability.

Sounds too dry? Don't feel like reading on? Go on, there's a good bit about a doctor sticking his finger up my bum. Well good for you reader, less good for me and my bum and for that matter dignity.

I read this shocking story this afternoon about negligence in Essex maternity units. The story struck home with me because the case is very similar to our own - to the death of my beloved wife Lanie in 2007.

I've never really felt able to tell the full story. The horror of the events that left me widowed with newborn twins is/was so powerful that it kept me from raising the issue in a more public manner. It also prevented me launching a legal case - which I should have done before three years were up - and then perhaps been able to secure a financial legacy for the children whose mother was taken from them.

But reading the story I've linked to above has flicked a switch. I really want to tell the story now. The complete and full story of how a hospital's negligence from the management at the top to the nursing staff on the wards was so appalling that it lead to the neglect and death of my wife.