A Kick In The Crutch

So I’m not exactly sure how it happened but I am now laid up on the sofa, taking painkillers and if I need to get around the house I have to do so with the aid of crutches.

While sat at home yesterday afternoon I suddenly felt some pain in my knee and over the course of about two hours it got worse and so I phoned the non-emergency NHS 111 phone number to see what could be done. They arranged an appointment for me at 9pm at a nearby Medoc centre, but after another hour or so the pain had got a lot worse and so I called them back.

This time they sent out a non-emergency paramedic who assessed the knee. Her verdict was that there was something wrong with the ligaments and that I needed to keep off of it as much as possible and so recommended I get me some crutches. But the only way to do that was to get to the hospital.

Luckily the brother-in-law had been over for lunch, and so he drove me and The Wife to the hospital where the saga continued. Hospitals don’t seem to have a simple process of arrive/wait/get seen/get fixed any more, you get seen by about three different people before anything actually happens.

It's becoming my second home… pic.twitter.com/gmk1Pl5eET

— Ryan (@ryandrews) May 3, 2015

After waiting to check in at A&E and then waiting again to see another person in A&E (??) we were told to go round to the Minor Injuries unit. So we checked in there and waited for someone else to see me. Eventually we were told that we would now have to be seen by a doctor but to do that would involve checking in somewhere else. So we moved on to the Medoc department, informed the receptionist of our journey so far and were told that we could have an appointment at 11pm!!

I had come to the hospital to be seen quicker and now had an appointment two hours later than the one I’d originally made and still three and a half hours away!

Luckily, after kicking up a bit of a fuss, the receptionist said she’d try and slip us in a bit sooner and so we only ended up waiting about thirty minutes before being called in to see the doctor.

We ran through the story again and after a bit of prodding and putting notes onto the system he disappeared for about ten minutes. It turns out he wasn’t sure what to do and had to speak to different people to find out what to do next. One of these was to speak to the orthopedic team to get me a referral to have it investigated further.

After Doc had finished with me I was able to get me some crutches and there was one final journey to make, back through A&E and onto the X-ray department to make sure there was no bone damage. I was told to say I had fallen over if they asked what I’d done otherwise I would have been shunted between departments. There was only a five minute wait here before being wheeled in and plonked onto the bed to have radiation fired at my knee.

After this it was all done. I was wheeled back round to the reception before calling a taxi to take us home. We’d been at the hospital for about two and a half hours but all that had actually been done was that I’d got some crutches. The orthopedic team will probably call me in a couple of days to arrange an appointment to have the knee properly looked at but in the meantime I’ve got to keep off the knee, keep it elevated, apply a cold compress to it and to take some drugs to stop the pain and the swelling.

Guess I won’t be commuting to work over the next couple of days then!