"Two days sitting in A&E with a life threatening..."

on Friday, 22 December after three months of steadily going down hill I took my father into A&E as his condition was rapidly declining and had been over the past 2 to 3 weeks. He had had debilitating headaches for three months which had then almost stopped but which had immediately been replaced with steadily worsening lack of coordination, ability to speak, write and communicate along with growing confusion. All this in a man that three weeks earlier was working building a clocktower and incredibly capable on all levels. Once we arrived we saw a triage nurse who was nothing short of amazing and essentially told us that there was something definitely not right with my father and we should not leave until they gave my dad a brain scan, even if it meant coming back the next day if they didn’t do anything on that day. During this first visit over a period of around nine hours where my dad sat on a hard chair waiting the whole day we saw several people who undertook different coordination tests but nothing more, despite it being clear to them that something was not right they discharged us and sent us home, giving us some symptoms to look out for! looking back at this, it’s preposterous that they didn’t know immediately what was wrong with my dad and in the very least that it was far from normal and that something sinister was taking place. Despite my many attempts and requests for a scan they were all denied. On Christmas Eve morning my mother called an ambulance as my father could not communicate or walk very well also make or coordinate any physical movements and he was taken to the resuss unit of the same hospital. we again went through the whole thing with a completely new set of doctors one of which was very very good but he was interrupted almost immediately upon trying to assess my father in the resuss bed /unit shortly after my dad had arrived by extremely rude nurse/sister who burst in and told the Dr he had five minutes left and then wasted time haggling with the Dr eventually settling on eight minutes, if none of this had taken place my father might of got treatment earlier and there may have been less long-term effects of his condition but I guess we’ll never know! My father then spent another 13 hours waiting for someone to come back to us and eventually we saw the doctor and another doctor who eventually agreed to do a CT scan even though they though the impression I got was that the dramatic change in my father from being normal to being almost disabled in three weeks was nothing sinister. As soon as the scan was done things started to move, as the double subdural haematoma was of course very serious indeed. My father was blue-lit to kings college hospital in London almost immediately where he had emergency brain surgery and is now undertaking speech and physical therapy but we’re unsure whether he’ll ever regain everything back? If only the Triage-Nurse was in charge that day!