Latest in saga of disastrous graft op

[Hilary Johnson]

Hi
Yes, there's been a lot of weather here recently.

I get round the "3 pairs of glasses" problem by having varifocals with photochromic (and various other) coatings - which works fine - but as you might guess, they don't come cheap.

And emails, or even proper letters, are never guaranteed to be private. Even if you put CONFIDENTIAL in bold across the top. I speak from experience. Though I have found some people have enough good manners to apologise if their inappropriate disclosure is pointed out to them politely but firmly.

Re the GP etc, this whole situation seems to have got SO complicated, with so many different specialists, and unresolved loose ends, and complaints and letters that haven't been passed on, or shouldn't have been passed on, and so forth, that I'm not really surprised at any one individual doctor not wanting to have to deal with it... particularly if they have only 7 minutes with you.

Might the practice manager be able to have a proper meeting, i.e. a whole hour, with you, to try and sort this out? Or would that just be in danger of blowing up into yet more misunderstandings and unpleasantness? If "both", is there someone who could go with you as a peacekeeper, to steer the conversation back into a constructive direction if necessary? I'd offer myself, but I'm so far away. I'm sure they'd rather it was resolved than goes on festering, really, and if you approach with the slant of, "I'll drop all the complaints if only we can get this properly sorted out, and I get the treatment and care that I need," they might go for it.

H

[rosemary johnson]

Hi H.
People have mentioned varifocals! - and photochromic coating. But despite Keith Nelson's enthusiasm, I've never found it half as useful as polarising, which does seem to cut down the glare (from glints of reflective surfaces, including wet roads/pavements).
Apart fromt he costs (I once had to deal, qua union rep, with a case of a member in dispute with management about her employer's contribution to the costs of computer-screen-distance glasses when what she actually wanted was a 3-phase varifocal and to get them to chip in a proportion..... forget how it was resolved inthe end)....
...... and apart frot he fact that ATM they'll be out of date in 3 months probably!......
...... the thought of being out on a horse, riding round the fields on a path going all up and down (yeah, even if it is Essex!) and trying to see where the path is going so as not to start feeling dizzy, and the bit I want to see out of is the reading part and it suddenly goes all fuzzy and trying to tilt head down and peer up out of distance part past helmet bbrim....
Sorry, starting to feel seasick at the thought....!
Poor DUke has an ingection in his back hooves again, so hasn't been ridden for a while. Last time we went out, there was a kid roaring about on a quad ike, he was getting very jittery and jumping about and I was getting quite badly dizzy...... no (physical_ harm done, inthe end, but it's days like that when I wonder why I don't give up.....
and my "balance" is just so dodgy since that bloody op, I get dizzy and seasick so often and at the stupidest things....
SOrry..... long weekend and too much not-sleeping.....
Re GP: I don't know abou the practice manager..... maybe. One trouble is, I don't really know what the trouble is exactly! But if everything I gather fromt he hospital is right, there are communications between them that aren't on the computer - and then there are things on the GP's computer that one of the nurses finds when we're looking for something else that no-one at the hospital is owning up to or explaining (plus one they have, as a side issue, believed to be a dictaphone tape getting stuck!). Plus it's all buried in mounds of STUFF cos every hospital appointmnet they send my GP a routine update letter anyway, so the stuff of interest in hidden in the haystack (!) and I can't read their screens anyway.....
SO what I'm mainly left with is the feeling this all doesn't add up somewhere, someone (or ones!) aren't being straight somewhere, and someone(s) is/are trying to carve something up behind my back.
Youknow, a bit like when parents don't tell you something cos they don't want to hurt or burden the Little Dears, but you know jolly well there's smething that doesn't oc,ute and they aren't been level. Know what I mean?
- apart from little matter of parity of nomenclature, "disappointing" ab performance, and the simple fact both I and they have moved house since I first signed on and in opposite directions.
The latter alone would be regarded as sensible motivation for a move.
BTW I've today received a copy of GP's referal letter. Mainly refers to previous report and (non-attached!) attachments (I think letter to him from anaesthetist and my copy of the bits of my emails to latter with what I actually asked for).
Doesn't actually explicitly ask to check if this is the right place or has there been a misunderstanding - so will have to ask that as first thing when I go.
We shall see what happens (if anything.....)
Rosemary

[Hilary Johnson]

Hi R

GLASSES
I have an antiglare coating too - not sure if it's actually polarising.
I found it took about 3 weeks before I got used to varifocals - up till then, yes, I got the dizzy feeling of looking through the wrong bit when I looked sideways, now I don't at all. Though I made sure I was used to it around the house before I wore them for driving.
But it's different for different people so maybe you're right that it wouldn't suit you.
Of course new glasses are cheaper if you get new lenses put in old frames - yeah yeah, teach my grandmother, I know...

PRACTICE MANAGER
My main concern about you is that now the situation is all so complex that you're not getting the information you should and are missing getting the referrals that you need because the paperwork is in a mess. I suspect that the practice manager may be the only person who has any hope of being able to set aside enough time to sift through the paperwork with you and pick up on what's been missed.

However, my other concern is, that if you make any sort of big deal about WHY it got in a mess, the important issues - of getting you the information and attention and treatment that you need - may get lost in the discussion. Do you really need to ask anyway? - Isn't it most likely that got in a mess because there's too much of it, they're overworked, underpaid, and a bit chaotic anyway. Do you seriously expect they'll admit to that??? They might if you were all friends and they knew you'd just laugh it off, but if they're afraid you might make another complaint against them ... well... I've never suceeded in getting any useful help from anyone who's one the defensive - my hunch is that if they are being unhelpful and not answering your questions, it's because they are in CYA (Cover Your err... posterior) mode. I have found that making a big show of saying things like "I'm not here to have an argument, I don't want this to get escalated, I just want to get it sorted out" can help enormously.

Anyway, good luck, and we all await developments.
Hilary

[rosemary johnson]

Hi H.
I've heard about people getting used to varifocals (and not). My situation is complicated by 1) my balance has got screwed up by the anaesthetic anyway, and wasn't too hot after an earlier neck injury, so am more likely to get dizzy spells and 20 the thing I really need the good distance vision for is riding out onthe road (so can get better view of traffic coming up behind) and it is horse riding which can trigger the "unable to handle unexpecting motion sensations", especially of horse starts slipping/stumbing on rough paths or going downhill, or starts napping or shying, so I need to be able to see the path down there ahead to get an idea of what motion ought to be coming up. Ifyou see what I' mean.

Haven't worn glasses since IVth form, so no old frames...... bt I know in theory!

GP: I strongly suspect what happened about the letter was: other GP opened post, read letter, realised it said "please refer" at end and put up note. Busy person in office got message to send letter to me, looked up letter received (and now scanned into compputer), thought "Oh, it's just a routine update letter from the hospital, we getdozens of those for that patient, no need to discuss each one" and cancelled instruction to write to me without reading carefully enough to realise there was a referral request in the latter stages (earlier part is a sort of "official confirmation" of view the main culprit was a bad reaction to the steroids, which I'm relieved to see confirmation is plausible!
I haven't actually made any complaints about anyone or anything, yet (other than oddly-passed on email at hospital) and certainly haven't complained about anything at gp's.
The things missing aren't paperwork but phone calls - or rather, one end records phone calls, other end has no trace, no record, no recollection.... even allowing for call back messages not getting through/unresolved voicemail-tag, leaves suggestion of people chatting about trying to carve things up behind my back and not being open about it. If GP is having phone calls or making paper notes he's not putting onthe computer, how will practice manager know?? - and hospital notes ahve "gone missing"!
The referral - we shall see about......
Maybe there is nothing "behind" this keenness to get me to agree to a referral is nothing more than the typical male desire to "know a bloke who does" - but wish someone would say so!
Rosemary
slowly thawing out after spending day all alone in cold warehouse

[rosemary johnson]

PS: re your coatings - I think it's unlikley to be polarising unless it actually says so.
But you can always check - try looking at something known to emit polarised light and turn your head from side to side - for example, a grey LCD display which will turn black with your head at a certain angle, or a blue sky.
Or get another polarising filter and rotate it - will go from "no difference" to complete black at 90 degrees from each other.
As I'm sure you remember!
BTW, if you're not one of those people who have one permanently fixed tothe front of your camera, congratulations! I mean.... they have their uses and benefits, but I've seen too many of the results of overdoing them markedly. Or maybe that's gone out o fashion again now??
R

[rosemary johnson]

SOme news at last!
Got home from work last night to find a message on my answering machine from Ruth - the practice nurse at the GP's who does the asthma clinics and has been finding out lots of things for me, and chasing up missing test results.
The paper copy of the second set of test results has arrived at long, long last.
9th July I took the sample in - 4 months and 5 days to get a path lab test result back; is this a record????????
So I promptly put my coat back on and went back to the bus stop and went round to collect the copy she sad was waiting for me.
And what did I find?
A single piece of paper, in a very similar formt and laout to last time.
Bearing a very familiar list of street drugs, all labelled "Negative" - except for Ketamine (bizarrely!) labelled "Not detected".
All exactly as it was last time.
Except that at the bottom there is an extra line that says:
"NB. No opiates detected. No unusual peaks detected on GLC screen. Remifentantl [sic] not detected."
All the same spelling mistakes and the same formatting error as before.
I can see that this is going to end up framed and hung on the wall!
However..... I do know someone who used to use a GLC and knows what they are and how they work....... it's a Gas-Liquid Chromatograph.
ANyone remember those experimetns at school where you got a large sheet of blotting paper, and in a line an inch or so from the bottom you put blobs of blue ink and black ink and red felt pen and Ribena and..... and then you stood the blotting paper up with the bottom in a saucer of water and left it.
And when you came back, the water had seeped up the blotting paper and taken the ink, etc with it - except each blob of ink, etc had separated out into different colour blobs at different heights up the piece of blotting paper - a bit like a rather wet and blurry bar code?
Well, it seems they put my sample through the machine that does a much more sophisticated version of this (or possibly two or three versions).
And they put in a sample of known content with it, and they know if the "known" item makes the equivalent of a black blob 1 inch up the botting paper, then at x,y and z inches up there'd be blobs if I'd been taking speed or cocaine or ecstacy - but there's no blobs there, so those are negative..... and etc etc for lots of other known positions.
And they're all negative for all the standard positions to look for blobs in, except that it would seem in the position for ketamine there's the equvalent of a faint smudge on the blotting paper - not enough of a black splodge to say for definite there's anything there, but enough of a smudge they can't be 100% sure it's negative.
FOr a sample from me, I'm sure there must have been the equivalent of a big black splodge where "caffeine" would be, and an even biggr one for the place labelled "theobromine (chocolate)"!!!
And it seems this time they have explicitly said that there were no other marks where any other opiates might show up, they have explicitly looked and checked there is nothing where the opioid I was given with the anaesthetic would show, and there's no other odd marks they can't explain.
Now, they first one they did that is appeared have been messed up, they didn't say this, only that they hadn't found any of the given standard list of street drugs (only a vague smudge arond the "ketamine" area) but it didn't say whether or not they'd actually checked there weren't any others. But they might have done.
SO.......
I'm not about to have the Persons In Blue round to arrest me for possession of illegal substances!
But otherwise, not terribly helpful!
The idea was, I might have been breaking down the anaesthetic chemicals in an unusual manner - and noe which took longer than usual, hence going on having hallucinations long after the stuff should have worn off (and I took a long time to wake up anyway).
But not only do we not know whether or not they actually checked for odd ones on the previous run - and I'm not that surprised they weren't still showing by July - but it gives little idea of what that odd metabolism might have been if that's what I was doing.
But it does ssuggest that, if odd metabolites had been there, they'd have had a good chance of finding them on the chromatograph. If they looked for absence of unusual marks on the first pass, when the first set of tests was run in early May, at which time I did still feel like I was "leaching out" waste products from the anaesthetic.
Hmmm, I think a few more phone calls on Monday morning!
The other possibility is: I was breaking it down into something that looked vaguely as if it had come from ketamine. But there was only a tiny trace left so they couldn't give a positive finding.
Or...... I broke something else down into something that looked a bit like ketamine...... or ... it was just "a smudge on the blotch" -just one of those things.
Might explain the power of the first hour or so's hallucinations if my weird metabolism was interpreting the stuff as like ketamine - clubbers use it to get some very very potent "trips" indeed (or so I've heard!)
Unfortunately.....
...... the same thing on the second set couldn't prove anything, as it is also used by vets to sedate horses - and we had the vet up at the field where Duke lives not long before the second test. Two little grey ponies being castrated, and the one I was holding onto, it took enough ketamine to sedate him as would normally be enough for two cart horses! - unlikely I could have picked up enough actually ketamine without having horrible hallucinations from it, but not 100% impossible I might have picked up some of the pony's own metabolites from grooming/mucking out later.
So, pretty inconclusive, actually, and not very helpful. Without a couple of phone calls, at least.
But I shall be steering clear of opioid painkillers, just in case.
Meanwhile, the grafted eye is still as sore and dry and itchy as anything, and the soothing-wetting eyedrops only seem to make it sticky. My own eye is red and sore from having to have a lens in so much, and I think I'm getting the lurgy that's going round, which won't help either!
Rosemary

[rosemary johnson]

DO I believe this..........??
Unfortunately, probably....
Had letter from hospital about the complaint I didn't make.
One paragraph about the bit they were oging to let "run its course" - the guy who stuck a 4-page consent form under my nose and demanded I sign it there and then without reading it is no longer working there. SO can't comment on what he may have said to me.
Lots of guff about getting information about surgical procedures. Excuse me, but that's not the point! - consent form is legal document, you need to know what legally you are signing over.
Other paras about thiings which are not what I would have complained about if I had made a complaint, and which are simply factually incorrect anyway.
And apparently, according to That Surgeon, GP told him me knew me personally two days before he (GP) told me he'd never met me. Shome Misktake, Shurely? - Ed.
Also pretty pee'd off at attempt to try telling me who my own GP is!!!!
Have written back, I hope appropriately........
Meanwhile have made strategic decision will not put in any more of the particulalry-dehydrating anti-glaucoma drop any later inthe evening than the start of the Archers (!!) and seem to be waking up feeling like the Sahara a bit less. Not sleeping that much better but live in hope. IOP not known.
Meanwhile meanwhile: I have a large and rather sore bruise where a horse - someone else's horse! - tried to ite a chunk out of my hand. I THINK!! she was aiming for the bundle of hay I was carrying at the time!
Rosemary

[Hilary Johnson]

R
The bit I struggle to believe is the bit about - 1:49am - IS there such a time?!!??
I know you're not sleeping too well but that seems a bit extreme - do look after yourself.....
I'd believe all the rest.
H

[rosemary johnson]

Hi H.
Yup, 01:49 definitely does exist. As do 02:49, 03:28, 04:16 etc etc.
But you know me, absolutely no sense of the passage of time.
It has it's advantages - makes me totally immune to jet lag.
Unfortunately, I can believe the rest too......
And am sleeping even less well than ever, what with not being able to lie comfortably on what I hope is just a bruised rub cage and not broken rib(s).
(as per 4-footed friends thread, oh dear....)
R

[rosemary johnson]

COuld this be a step in the right direction???
Finally got an email through to the hospital (whose email server doesn't seem to like my address!) in response to second letter about that complaint I didn't make.
Have had a reply back - fro the Chief executive himself, no less!!!!!
I am living in hope this means progress.
Meanwhile, am still getting distinct feeling that my nice anaesthetist (?) is trying to palm me off onto some totally inappropriate shrink under cover of claiming this is the person I've been askign to see about the brain damage to the motion processing and memory retrieval functions. GRRRRR!!!!!!!
Eye meanwhile is still feeling drya nd fritty and sore most of the time, getting mroe and more astigmatic so reading with it is getting harder and harder, and the patterns of blobs and streaks around each street light or headlamp as I walk up the road are getting taller and narrower all the time.
And the suspect cracked rib is still very suspect and sleeping difficult cos so hard to get comfy in bed. Hping to see someone I know tomorrow who has a rib (or 2??) that cracks at the drop of a hat after previous accidnet and compare symptoms.
Rosemary
still thawing out after v v cold afternoon at Plumpton races