I hope for the best for your sis, renster. Hope any chemo or radiotherapy she needs is of the most benign type around, at least with thyroid chancer the odds are fairly good and it can be targeted fairly easily with radio-iodine. I hope she doesn't end up finding herself in the middle of a godawful puke-fest. Pain, I can take, but there is just something viscerally nasty about nausea, if its only physical pain, I can push myself, at least to a point, by telling myself that it will end, all pain comes to an end of its own accord, you either make it, or you don't, and either way, you aren't in pain anymore. But sickness is something I've never dealt well with at all.
I've just had to put up with the most arse over tit pack of incompetent bungling toerags of medical staff myself. At least, trying to get help was rotten, they have a non-emergency number, 111, for cases that don't require an ambulance, so, I went and tried to save there from being a need for paramedics to use their valuable time, where people could find themselves in a situation that really is walking a fine line between life and death, and I get told that an out of hours GP appointment is needed. Find myself on the fucking beller for all sodding night long waiting for them to call back, until I decide fuck it, I've had enough, and that the problem is only going to worsen with time, such as being off my seizure meds, it'll only cause a physical withdrawal, which will progressively worsen, etc. etc. and that would be downright unpleasant at best, I got told 'you need to make an out of hours appt' 'we are making an appt for you' 'an appointment has BEEN made for you' (it hadn't) and you just need to wait until it is time, ending up being arsed about until I had lost all patience with them, and rang back, at which point things had gotten worse to the point where the twerp on the other end of the phone feels like it is his duty to show a bit of honour and make it clear that in deciding whether or not I needed an appointment, he was now going to oh, only put me through to someone with medical training, telling me he didn't know a thing about medicine himself, and was just pushing buttons and inputting data.
And when I finally do speak to someone who DOES have medical knowledge they promptly decide that I needed them to send out a paramedic crew asap!. They on the other hands, i can't speak more than too highly of the two paramedics who did attend on me, they even went out of their way to make sure that the out of hours medics would be expecting me, and that I got a quick appointment, they were professional, kind, decent people. no standoffishness or acting like gobshites for their being a controlled drug needed (what wasn't helping things, is that I had no idea it was a bank holiday monday this monday, and while the surgery I get my meds rx'd from almost always rings me up a few days in advance to tell me I need to pick up the rx slips the friday prior. Didn't bother or remember this time on their part though, and I knew nothing about it being a bank holiday though until sunday, and late sunday, where everything and everyone is closed, even the late night pharmacy round here.)
So I've just got back home, cost me about 60 quid in cab fare there and back, to the hospital, been barfing my insides, outside all sodding night, JUST got my rx meds, or at least, sufficient to last me until tomorrow. Why not just write the damn things all up and save time I don't know, so all that effort, for in the case of one of the meds, just two tablets, seems a lot more fuckabout than its worth. Certainly I'd rather not have to spent about 5-6 hours perched on a metal slab of a chair that is several inches too short for my arse just for the sake of a very small number of each of the meds dosage units, a doctor who gives me grief for requesting him specify that one of the meds be dispensed in a glass bottle (its a very, very oldfashioned medication, next to nobody uses it, those who do generally only script it as a 'drug of last resort' (chlormethiazole, if you were wondering which) and because nobody really uses it these days, people aren't well up on its characteristics, quite BECAUSE nobody uses it, nobody gets to be familiar with it as a consequence. And what very rarely do doctors have any awareness of, is the fact that it eats plastic. It's like pouring acetone onto polystyrene foam, it just melts it a red hot knife being plunged into butter or a box of lit matches being thrown into a tub full of phosphorus. The doctor had a go at me for requesting a glass bottle be specified, because he seemed fairly young, and that it'd just not be a med of his generation's having much familiarity with it, I didn't say that to him, mind you, just asked that it be glass, and explained why. And to be fair to me, it IS mandatory for the stuff, you can't expose plastics to it, teflon and the like, yeah, but most plastics just melt. Not really unfair thing to ask is it? that the physical requirements for handling the material are met on my behalf? he just went off about how he can't change the drug, he can't do this, won't do that, blah blah blah, when I wasn't even ASKING him to change the type of drug or dosage, only to make sure it is shipped correctly, there isn't an option even available to change capsule dosages, there IS only one capsule dosage unit manufactured, theres a syrup, and there is capsules, thats your lot, comes as liquid, comes as capsules, like it or lump it, because thats what you are getting if you are to use the drug at all, there is no option 'C', at least not unless you wish to prepare it yourself, starting from vitamin B1, a not particularly difficult process, although one that does require scrupulous cleaning of an intermediate compound, because it is highly poisonous, being a powerful convulsant neurotoxin. Which needless to say, one doesn't really want as something that might slip itself into the batch of anti-convulsant medication one is making at the time, for obvious reasons!
And this doctor, I went, after bringing old boxes of empty meds that had been refilled recently with me as evidence of the scripts etc. actually had the nerve to tell me he wants me to stick my hands in his bin, and start grubbing around for a wet, soggy, slippery mess of a bloody cardboard carton, because it had my name and DOB on it! Who the fuck thinks ferreting around in a can of medical garbage is a good thing for someone to do in the first place I do not know, and to tell a patient to go pick through their clinical garbage, what the fuck!
All so I could have him fuck about with my being given a couple of doses, sufficient for only today, when I'm actually due for the refill itself today anyway...
Some days I REALLY wish I had a deep, spike-sided pit full of hungry alligators.....
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