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"Terrible experience"

About: Hawthorn Mc

I had a frankly shocking experience at this walk-in centre. The nurse I spoke to was rude from the outset, challenging my use of the term 'boils' (which is used on the NHS website and was used by a doctor I previously saw about the same kind of infection), then gave me instructions on treating insect bites when the bite I showed her was very clearly infected and my actual reason for calling was that it had transferred to my face, and a boil I had on my face previously became extremely painful and the NHS website says to see a doctor if you get one on your face. She finally agreed to see me after saying that I "clearly wouldn't accept that it was an insect bite" (I never challenged this, just stated that the bite was clearly infected and that I seemed to have spread that infection to my face, which was why I called), and as soon as I arrived, told me that I was overreacting, even denying that the boil on my face was red, hot and inflamed, which it very clearly was. A simple glance at my medical record would show that I have only sought medical attention twice previously since moving to Manchester in 2018, once when I couldn't breathe and once for the aforementioned previous boil, and I waited over a week to seek care in that instance because I have a bit of a phobia of medical settings. I showed her the scars from three previous boils for which I had not sought medical care, and she reluctantly agreed to give me antibiotics but said that I would ruin my immune system if I "kept taking them for things like this", to which I said again that I had not had antibiotics since the first boil on my face around Christmas 2020, and she just sarcastically said "okay". She then gave me a prescription for penicillin, and when I said that I am allergic to penicillin, she challenged this, saying that if all I'd had was a rash then I probably wasn't allergic. I said that I didn't know what my reaction had been since it happened when I was a young child but that it had been diagnosed by a doctor, and she chastised me for not mentioning my allergy sooner, when I had presumably reasonably assumed that it would be on my medical record. She was incredibly confrontational and condescending throughout, insinuating that I was wasting her time when providing healthcare is her job, there was nobody else in the waiting room when I went in, and she saw me 40 minutes after our agreed time, during which I was missing work at my job (at a homelessness charity) which I had to catch up on in my own time. I didn't complain about this because I understand that nurses are very busy, but I didn't appreciate being treated like a hypochondriac when I so rarely seek medical attention and my own time is also valuable. As I was leaving, she again reiterated instructions on responding to bites, which at this point I had stated multiple times was not the reason for my visit. I have a chronic pain condition and do not complain of pain unless it is extremely bad. Hugely disappointing overall.

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