"They kept investigating until they found out what was wrong"

I have been sick for over 6 weeks now. I have been in hospital for 3 weeks and I was sick at home for the first 3 weeks. I rang my doctor at the start of week two, after having felt awful for a week with my symptoms gradually getting worse. I had a cough and a temperature. They asked me to get a COVID PCR test and prescribed me some standard antibiotics. My covid test was negative and I thought this would enable me to go into my doctors so that they could examine me and take a look at my chest this didn’t happen. I rang my GP again a week later as the antibiotics had no effect. I suggested that they try oral steroids and they helped a bit but not much. My GP then sent me up to the hospital as I was getting no better.

 In A and E the team did all sorts of tests. My chest x-ray was normal and I was very worried that I would just be sent home and told to stop wasting time. This wasn’t the case. Since then I have had numerous scans done and my CRP was very high, after some investigations they discovered I had an abscess on my liver.  From this moment on the doctors assembled a multidisciplinary team, with medical physicians and microbiologists and pharmacists. After trying a range of antibiotics they found a combination that appeared to be working and my CRP has been slowly decreasing. It was frustrating and worrying waiting to find out what was wrong. The microbiologists want to try to get a sample of the abscess so that they can find out what antibiotics would be most effective. I want to get a sample taken so that I can reassure myself that it’s not cancerous even though I’ve been told that it’s not that likely. I have been sent for several CAT scans and I am going for an MRI scan on Tuesday and I am looking forward to getting to the bottom of this infection.

The staff here in daisy hill are amazing. They are so caring and make up the perfect team. I am really grateful that they took the time to listen to me and believed me when I said something was wrong, even when their preliminary test results showed no infection, they knew something was wrong. The only thing I think could be improved would be for there to be more nurses