"My surgeon was profressional, ..."

What I liked

My surgeon was profressional, knowledgable and he saved my life.

Some of the nurses were very professional and used common sense to realise who were the patients they needed to deal with as opposed to those who were improving.

The pharmacist gave me a TV in my room for free after they found MRSA up my nose as I was recovering. It really helped me feel not so alone. He was a very nice chap.

What could be improved

I'm afraid a lot. I attended Lister Hospital for about a month with bowel complaints. In the end I had to have bowel surgery as my large intestine turned toxic. I was treated poorly for a long time and was in a great deal of pain before surgery was even considered. During this time some nurses were great, but some, a minority I might add, were awful. I even heard one nurse laughing and boasting that she wasn't going to give me the anti-sapsmodic for my bowel shortly after a very painful colonoscopy and that I should just walk off my pain as it was more than likely just "wind". Unfortunately I was in a different ward when I had to have the coln removed due to it being toxic. Another instance of utter rudeness and arrogance was displayed to me by a doctor. I simply asked what type of medication he was adding to the regime of 40 odd pills I was already getting and why he was doing so and he replied "I'm adding them because I want to" and dismissed my question. I simply wanted to know what was going in my body. I experienced massively long waiting times when in an amazing amount of pain after pressing the nurse call button and I know of other patients experiencing the same issues. Some of them were extremely ill and on morphine injections and having to wait a prolonged time for each injection because the nurses were "busy". I was also taken off daily injections of steroids very quickly without any tapering just after my surgey and even the upon realising this one of the doctors was extremely surprised and put me on oral steroids with a tapering regime, but it took 2 whole days of me in agony for the doctors to listen to me. Also, at one point a nurse decided it was a good idea to feed me through my nasal gastric tube while bile and liquid was still coming up, meaning I was left with a night or wretching before a doctor came to see me to allow the nurses to pull out the tube, and I then managed to finally vomit out all the bile that was building up in my stomach.

Anything else?

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with what happened to me, and I have had to have a subsquent follow up op. I decided to go private with that one following the treatment at Lister. If a relative fell ill I would recommend they stay away from the lister due to the care I think they would fail to receive having lived out my nightmarish time at the hospital.

I was desperately ill and when someone develops toxic megacolon it can be fatal. It wasn't discovered that it was so bad until I was opened up for surgery. Why did it have to get to that stage for people to realise how ill I was? Did they not believe me? On more than one occasion I asked to be injected with something to send me into the next world, of course they wouldn't do that....but I had become very very low.

And finally, when I got home I found out on my discharge form I had toxic megacolon in the diagnosis box. It said "is patient aware of diagnosis?" with a big tick next to the "yes" box. This is the first I had heard that I had toxic megacolon.

Having said all of that, the surgeon who actually got to operate on me was excellent. He did a great job and also worked on during my second operation privately. A true hero in terms of what he did. But some of the care happening in that hospital was scary.

I hate to moan and complain and it's taken nearly 2 years for me to realise I needed to comment on all of this. A truly sad experience with some very painful memories that will go with me all the way to the grave.