Website of Aiden O'Reilly

So I waited and waited in that dingy, depressing A&E section. I have to admist, a lot of the dismal atmosphere is due to the type of people who are waiting there. Obvious heroin addicts and homeless people. Some of them frankly smelly. One hard man surrpetitiously drinking a can of cider. The only two or three who – say – would have been allowed pass through the doors of The Porterhouse pub were foreigners.

After about six hours I was brought into the inner waiting room and a doctor took blood samples etc. I tried to interest him in the CT scans, but he said to keep them to show them to the orthopaedic surgeon later. Then I waited another 2 hours. Then I had an x-ray and again waited.

Finally the (general) doctor who had first seen me called me and said the consultants had view my x-rays and I didn’t need an operation. I was to turn up at the fracture clinic on Thursday. (This was Monday.)

I had a growing awareness through the preceeding eight hours that by the time doctors encountered a patient here, that patient would be suffering from sleep-deprivation, hungry, angry and resentful. Couple that with the fact that more than half – to judge by appearances – would be likely to have a problem with authority or would be used to better standards back in Eastern Europe. Doctors here would be constantly on the defensive, listening to outpurings of dissatisfaction. And I too at this stage – in a T-shirt with the side cut off, not having slept in 36 hours – I felt robbed of dignity. I felt it entirely possible that if I spoke no-one would listen to see if I was making sense. I felt as though I might be brushed aside condescendingly.

I explained that the doctors in Santa Cruz had gone to a lot of trouble to take the CT scans on very expensive machinery. “Do you not think the doctors here should take a look at them?” I said.

The doctor wasn’t condescending at all – in fact he was very helpful. He made a few phone calls to insist that the CT scans be viewed. But the orthopaedic consultant who had viewed my x-rays had now gone into surgery – I would have to wait another two hours.

At last he came down and met me. He explained how it was that decisions on surgery were never easy and why he disagreed with the Spanish consultant. I was tired and confused at this stage, not rightly sure if he had seen the CT scans or the Spanish doctor’s report. I had the scans in my hand at that moment, but they had been out of my hands for some time. So I asked him if he had viewed them. Turned out he hadn’t. He took them off me and I felt a great sense of “mission accomplished”. There were 8 sheets of scans. Even to my untrained eye the level of detail is way beyond an x-ray.