"Thank You Paramedics and Staff at Whiston Hospital"

I have been suffering from a severe allergic reaction to something since May this year and have been back and forth to my GP with the most awful intensely itchy skin rash which they seemed to be baffled by. I'd been given every antihistamine under the sun plus steroids and nothing alleviated it and I got to the point on Tuesday this week when I was actually crying with the intensity of the itching and was tearing my skin to pieces. My daughter in law pressured me to go to hospital so that's what we did. I had no sooner sat down in the A&E waiting room than I was called into Triage where my pulse was discovered to be 131 and so I was whisked off to Observation Ward where I was injected with all sorts of stuff and I was kept there for about 7 hours all in all, until I was stable again. The doctor was marvellous, she listened very carefully to me and she told me I needed an urgent referral to a dermatologist and that she would write a letter to my GP straight away. The nursing staff also were absolutely wonderful, very calm, unruffled, considerate and polite.

I was sent home in a stable condition and I felt fine until I woke today at 8.30 to find my airways closing up, my tongue was swollen and my lower lip was also badly swollen. So I dialled 999 as I had been advised to do and the Ambulance arrived in 4 minutes and I was pumped with adrenalin and taken back to Whiston Hospital and kept under observation until 7pm. Once again, I have nothing but praise for the efficiency of the paramedics, hospital medical staff and the auxilliary staff also. They really made what could have been a very scary experience into a very pleasant short stay.

Not only that but the hospital is brand spanking new, pristine clean, no clutter, no posters on the walls harbouring germs, no annoying beeps from machines, it wasn't silent, there was the reassuring sound of nurses voices rather than computer bleeps going off and the atmosphere was what I would call that of a 'proper patient-friendly hospital'. My only concern of the day was that some of the staff were working a 14 hour shift, they weren't complaining at all but I just think that's way to long to be working when you consider travel time from home to work and work back to home again. Nurses by their very nature are nurses because they love their job but that's often all the more reason why they accept more of a workload than they probably should so I'm not too happy about that from a welfare point of view. As a patient I really value the care I receive from medics and I think it's also a patient's responsibility to take care of the people who care for them in whatever way we can. So that's my three penny worth for today. Thank you so much to the staff at Whiston Hospital - you're fantastic!