"The NHS let my mum down"

On Thursday 4th June 2009 my mum was admitted to the QEQM hospital in Margate for a hysterectomy, as she was told that they had found a cyst on her ovary which they thought was cancerous. Her operation was booked in for the Friday afternoon and all went well until it came to the after care and the cleanliness of the hospital, she was put in a nice big room all on her own which was lovely but I am not aware of the room being cleaned during the whole of her stay. She was brought back to the hospital ward after her operation late Friday evening and all was well until Saturday morning when her epidural, that they had given her for pain Relie, failed so they tried her on morphine which was making her really sick so anti-sickness followed that, but the pain and the sickness carried on, till in the end they decided to put her back to sleep.

The next day she struggled through the pain on just tilex pain killers because she didn’t want to be sick any more it was making the pain worse because it was pulling on all her stomach muscles.

That night at 9.45pm they decided that they needed her room even though the ward was really quiet so they woke her up and she had to get all her bits together to be moved down to a different room. The next morning they said she could go home even though her surgeon had said she would need to stay in for at least 5 days after her operation - she was in agony, one of the nursing staff was great and gave mum a bath and then realised that she was not ready to go home so went to get the ward sister, who turned to the nurse and said don’t worry she will be alright.

By this time my mum was really upset and asked me to go in and pick her up. When I got to the hospital ward they said they had move her to the departure lounge but by the time I had walked down there my mum was in tears over the amount of pain she was in. They had given her no pain relief that day at all, she cried the whole way home that day because of the pain.

My mum already suffers with rheumatoid arthritis, so is used to being in constant pain. Her whole stay here was a nightmare and definitely not one to be remembered.