I've always had a problem with the phrase "caught like a rat in a trap". I feel it could be improved upon. Rats are smart. Rats, once caught, sometimes make it out of traps.
But they never make it out of cats.
I currently feel much like a rat in a cat. It has now been six weeks since I had an injection of lanreotide. They only last for a month. During that month I did feel much better. At one point I ran upstairs and my heartrate barely increased, even though I hadn't taken my medication that day. For me, that is a medial coup indeed.
Alas, those halcyon days are gone. I'm back to taking two or three propranolol tablets a day to keep my heartrate as normal as possible. My moments of hypoglycaemia (brought on by the lanreotide injections) have been replaced by finding the six flights of stairs to my desk much more challenging in the morning.*
As you can imagine, I am chafing under this new and irritating regime, rendered all the more irritating by the fact that if my stupid former GP's surgery didn't have such nonsensical rules then I would have had my second injection by now and all would be hunky dory. Consequently, I'm calling the hospital every week to find out what's going on. I contact one of the nurses in the endocrine department, who is lovely, and then we have a mutual guilt festival, whereby she feels guilty for not being able to give me good news and I feel guilty for making her feel guilty considering that it's not her fault in the slightest.
I called last Wednesday, at the five-weeks-since-last-injection mark, and the nurse said that she could confirm all the paperwork had finally been submitted, and she seemed optimistic that it would get approved quickly and I'd get the injection soon. I called again today but the atmosphere of optimism had sadly been replaced with uncertainty over exactly how long this would take. Apparently, if your life is not immediately threatened by the lack of medication, then it doesn’t matter that you're symptomatic and the tumour in your head could well be growing happily like an evil, greedy mushroom.** You just have to be patient.
If ever I had wondered how the word "patient" had come to have two such different meanings - meaning in the first instance, a calm endurance of difficulty, and in the second, a person receiving medical treatment - I stopped wondering some time ago, because it seems that extreme feats of patience are required pretty much as soon as you become a patient.
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*I should point out that my desk is in an office which is accessed by climbing six flights of stairs and then walking along a corridor. I don't just have a desk sitting atop a massive staircase, although that would be quite awesome.
** I don't like mushrooms.
Showing posts with label money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label money. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 September 2012
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Girl with Acromegaly Sues NHS
A story broke some time ago about a young lady with acromegaly who sued the NHS, and won. I've been meaning to write about her for a while but I wanted to take the time to create an interesting and informative post contrasting her case with that of Kane Gorny. Alas, I have not had the time, so you'll just have to deal with a dull and uninformative post instead. Hurrah!
The story is this: Kate Woodward, an aspiring actress, developed acromegaly (i.e. a pituitary tumour secreting growth hormone, which lead to uncontrolled growth of her body) as a child, which went untreated between 2001 and 2005 as medics failed to spot the condition. She attained a final height of 6'5" aged 20, and sued the NHS for £2 million. She was awarded compensation of £1.3m.
Incidentally, the award for "least sensitive headline about this story" goes to Healthcare Today UK, which went with "Freak Growth Woman Sues NHS".*
Nice.
Her case for being awarded this level of compensation was that, as a result of her condition being untreated for so long:
- Her height and "ugliness" meant that she could no longer go into a career as an actress.
- She has psychological difficulties and feels like a "freak" because of her condition.
- She has significant problems with her bones, knees and teeth, and cannot buy normal-sized clothes.
- The condition affected her childhood, schooling and friendships.
And, most significantly:
- She wishes to receive all future treatment in the private sector.
Now, not long after this story was first brought to my attention (by a colleague, thank you!) I noticed that it had also popped up as a topic of discussion on the Pituitary Foundation's forum. For those of you who don't subscribe, one member created a poll entited something like "Should Kate Woodward be ashamed of herself?" The results of the poll were overwhelmingly that she should (although in fairness by "overwhelmingly", I mean "there were four votes in total").
Why the anger? Surely she has a fairly good case, right? Undoubtedly, when a doctor is presented with a girl who measured 5'9" at just eleven years old and keeps growing, you'd hope that it wouldn't take four years to just Google it and think "hmm, maybe we should rule out acromegaly". Although we can't know that faster treatment would have effected a cure, it might have controlled or reduced the symptoms. She will have to live with injections and monitoring and joint problems and feeling self-conscious for her whole life.
BUT.
The problem is that this is not, actually, an unusual case - at least, not within the magical world of pituitary tumours. If every person with acromegaly decided to sue the NHS for delayed diagnosis, it would be one hell of a bonus day for lawyers. If you threw in people with other often-missed pituitary conditions like Cushing's Disease and TSHoma, it would probably result in a sudden UK lawyer shortage as they all retired to small Caribbean islands. If you based the level of compensation awarded on the number of years the condition went undiagnosed, the small Caribbean islands would probably reinvent themselves as world financial hubs.
I exagerate. But the mean length of time from onset of symptoms to diagnosis of acromegaly is, according to this MedScape article, around 12 years. Even if that estimate is too high, the point is that pituitary tumour conditions can be hard to diagnose, and they are often missed because they're rare enough that doctors don't see them often, and often don't expect to see them either. Four years to diagnose a patient with acromegaly is, sadly, not uncommon. I first showed symptoms of my TSH-secreting pituitary tumour aged 17, and I didn't get a diagnosis until I was 22. (In case you're bad at maths, that's five years). Even after my superfast heartrate made it clear that Something Was Wrong, it took a year to work out what that something was.
So if there's a slight lack of sympathy from other acromegalomaniacs,** it could be because they're thinking "Damn, £2m! Wish I'd thought of that."
But I doubt it. And I'm not just saying that because they're bigger than me.***
Now I want to note right off the bat that where there is evidence of medical negligence or it takes a long time to get a diagnosis, you should complain. Vociferously. You should complain in the hope that procedures can be improved. Otherwise there's nothing to stop future patients from suffering through the same tortuous process to find out what's wrong with them. But there's a difference between seeing a problem, taking a complaint as far as necessary to fix that problem for future patients, and just suing to get as much as you can out of them. Through the normal complaints process, the hospital in question offered Miss Woodward compensation of £700k, no court appearance required. If she lives to the age of 90, that would be £10,000 medical expenses covered every year. Additionally, according to the Daily Mail, which I personally take with a pinch of salt and under the supervision of a doctor, the hospital trust had already spent £288,000 on Miss Woodward for "treatment, dental care, holidays and special footwear".
Even the £500k difference between what she was offered and what the court awarded is a big chunk of money. £500k that could have gone towards treating other patients. I need somatostatin analogue injections (probably much like those Miss Woodward takes), and if you've been reading this blog lately, you'll know that it is proving slightly tricky to persuade someone to fund them. £500k could pay for 666-and-a-bit doses of those injections. Which doesn't sound like that much, until you realise that each dose lasts for a month, so £500k worth of injections would last me for fifty-five years. And six months. Assuming I needed them continuously. And of course by that point I would be 79-and-a-half, so chances are I could be dead by then anyway.
And here's the thing. If the NHS messes up and, as a result, you end up incurring further costs in your daily life (eg. you're a professional tap dancer going into hospital for an appendectomy, and you wake up with a leg missing) then yep, you should get compensation and if they won't agree to pay it, sue them with my blessing and encouragement. If the clinical negligence of your child at birth leads to brain damage which will affect that child for their entire life, then sue for the money needed to support them. And if/when the NHS messes up so badly that it becomes a danger to other patients, and you follow through that complaints process and nothing changes, sue them until they sit up and pay attention and mend their ways.
But I am somewhat uncomfortable with suing the NHS for the loss of a career that did not yet exist, and for the costs of having exactly the same treatment as the NHS provides, but done privately. (I'm also intrigued by the concept, since she presumably did not have private health insurance before diagnosis and consequently insurers would be unlikely to cover her pre-existing condition?). I've had an MRI scan done by a private provider and done by the NHS and the experience was almost exactly the same - except the private hospital was a lot harder to get to on public transport.
I guess in some way I think that when the NHS messes up, part of the compensation is the NHS. The very fact that you live in a country where you don't have to worry about the cost of healthcare means that when the NHS makes a mistake, it - not you - ends up bearing any increased costs of your care as a result of its mistake. Perhaps in some countries when a patient gets a hospital-acquired infection, their bill from the hospital is increased - but in the UK, if a hospital gives you an infection, it has to foot the bill to try and fix it.
But it also means that when you sue an NHS hospital in the UK, you're not taking lobster off the table of a fat cat investor (well... not yet... comments about Mr Lansley on a postcard, please). You are taking money away from that hospital. Any sensible hospital trust will have a big old stash of contingency fund to cover the cost of lawsuits, but I still confess I'm uncomfortable with the idea of suing the NHS for anything less than an ironclad reason, because that money could be put to better use. It could be used to help treat someone just like you.
I don't think Kate Woodward is a bad person, and I don't think she should be ashamed of herself. I simply don't have sufficient details to form an opinion on this case, and she may well be entirely justified. But she sparks off an interesting debate. That's my opinion. What's yours?
______________________________________
*I noticed Jon Danzig, a journalist with acromegaly, took them to task for this in the comments section of the article, good on him!
** I don't know what the collective noun for "a group of people with acromegaly" is, but it should really be this.
***Common misconception: people with acromegaly only become very tall if the condition develops during childhood/adolescence. If it develops in adulthood, it will lead to bone and soft tissue growth but usually won't increase height much, if at all.
The story is this: Kate Woodward, an aspiring actress, developed acromegaly (i.e. a pituitary tumour secreting growth hormone, which lead to uncontrolled growth of her body) as a child, which went untreated between 2001 and 2005 as medics failed to spot the condition. She attained a final height of 6'5" aged 20, and sued the NHS for £2 million. She was awarded compensation of £1.3m.
Incidentally, the award for "least sensitive headline about this story" goes to Healthcare Today UK, which went with "Freak Growth Woman Sues NHS".*
Nice.
Her case for being awarded this level of compensation was that, as a result of her condition being untreated for so long:
- Her height and "ugliness" meant that she could no longer go into a career as an actress.
- She has psychological difficulties and feels like a "freak" because of her condition.
- She has significant problems with her bones, knees and teeth, and cannot buy normal-sized clothes.
- The condition affected her childhood, schooling and friendships.
And, most significantly:
- She wishes to receive all future treatment in the private sector.
Now, not long after this story was first brought to my attention (by a colleague, thank you!) I noticed that it had also popped up as a topic of discussion on the Pituitary Foundation's forum. For those of you who don't subscribe, one member created a poll entited something like "Should Kate Woodward be ashamed of herself?" The results of the poll were overwhelmingly that she should (although in fairness by "overwhelmingly", I mean "there were four votes in total").
Why the anger? Surely she has a fairly good case, right? Undoubtedly, when a doctor is presented with a girl who measured 5'9" at just eleven years old and keeps growing, you'd hope that it wouldn't take four years to just Google it and think "hmm, maybe we should rule out acromegaly". Although we can't know that faster treatment would have effected a cure, it might have controlled or reduced the symptoms. She will have to live with injections and monitoring and joint problems and feeling self-conscious for her whole life.
BUT.
The problem is that this is not, actually, an unusual case - at least, not within the magical world of pituitary tumours. If every person with acromegaly decided to sue the NHS for delayed diagnosis, it would be one hell of a bonus day for lawyers. If you threw in people with other often-missed pituitary conditions like Cushing's Disease and TSHoma, it would probably result in a sudden UK lawyer shortage as they all retired to small Caribbean islands. If you based the level of compensation awarded on the number of years the condition went undiagnosed, the small Caribbean islands would probably reinvent themselves as world financial hubs.
I exagerate. But the mean length of time from onset of symptoms to diagnosis of acromegaly is, according to this MedScape article, around 12 years. Even if that estimate is too high, the point is that pituitary tumour conditions can be hard to diagnose, and they are often missed because they're rare enough that doctors don't see them often, and often don't expect to see them either. Four years to diagnose a patient with acromegaly is, sadly, not uncommon. I first showed symptoms of my TSH-secreting pituitary tumour aged 17, and I didn't get a diagnosis until I was 22. (In case you're bad at maths, that's five years). Even after my superfast heartrate made it clear that Something Was Wrong, it took a year to work out what that something was.
So if there's a slight lack of sympathy from other acromegalomaniacs,** it could be because they're thinking "Damn, £2m! Wish I'd thought of that."
But I doubt it. And I'm not just saying that because they're bigger than me.***
Now I want to note right off the bat that where there is evidence of medical negligence or it takes a long time to get a diagnosis, you should complain. Vociferously. You should complain in the hope that procedures can be improved. Otherwise there's nothing to stop future patients from suffering through the same tortuous process to find out what's wrong with them. But there's a difference between seeing a problem, taking a complaint as far as necessary to fix that problem for future patients, and just suing to get as much as you can out of them. Through the normal complaints process, the hospital in question offered Miss Woodward compensation of £700k, no court appearance required. If she lives to the age of 90, that would be £10,000 medical expenses covered every year. Additionally, according to the Daily Mail, which I personally take with a pinch of salt and under the supervision of a doctor, the hospital trust had already spent £288,000 on Miss Woodward for "treatment, dental care, holidays and special footwear".
Even the £500k difference between what she was offered and what the court awarded is a big chunk of money. £500k that could have gone towards treating other patients. I need somatostatin analogue injections (probably much like those Miss Woodward takes), and if you've been reading this blog lately, you'll know that it is proving slightly tricky to persuade someone to fund them. £500k could pay for 666-and-a-bit doses of those injections. Which doesn't sound like that much, until you realise that each dose lasts for a month, so £500k worth of injections would last me for fifty-five years. And six months. Assuming I needed them continuously. And of course by that point I would be 79-and-a-half, so chances are I could be dead by then anyway.
And here's the thing. If the NHS messes up and, as a result, you end up incurring further costs in your daily life (eg. you're a professional tap dancer going into hospital for an appendectomy, and you wake up with a leg missing) then yep, you should get compensation and if they won't agree to pay it, sue them with my blessing and encouragement. If the clinical negligence of your child at birth leads to brain damage which will affect that child for their entire life, then sue for the money needed to support them. And if/when the NHS messes up so badly that it becomes a danger to other patients, and you follow through that complaints process and nothing changes, sue them until they sit up and pay attention and mend their ways.
But I am somewhat uncomfortable with suing the NHS for the loss of a career that did not yet exist, and for the costs of having exactly the same treatment as the NHS provides, but done privately. (I'm also intrigued by the concept, since she presumably did not have private health insurance before diagnosis and consequently insurers would be unlikely to cover her pre-existing condition?). I've had an MRI scan done by a private provider and done by the NHS and the experience was almost exactly the same - except the private hospital was a lot harder to get to on public transport.
I guess in some way I think that when the NHS messes up, part of the compensation is the NHS. The very fact that you live in a country where you don't have to worry about the cost of healthcare means that when the NHS makes a mistake, it - not you - ends up bearing any increased costs of your care as a result of its mistake. Perhaps in some countries when a patient gets a hospital-acquired infection, their bill from the hospital is increased - but in the UK, if a hospital gives you an infection, it has to foot the bill to try and fix it.
But it also means that when you sue an NHS hospital in the UK, you're not taking lobster off the table of a fat cat investor (well... not yet... comments about Mr Lansley on a postcard, please). You are taking money away from that hospital. Any sensible hospital trust will have a big old stash of contingency fund to cover the cost of lawsuits, but I still confess I'm uncomfortable with the idea of suing the NHS for anything less than an ironclad reason, because that money could be put to better use. It could be used to help treat someone just like you.
I don't think Kate Woodward is a bad person, and I don't think she should be ashamed of herself. I simply don't have sufficient details to form an opinion on this case, and she may well be entirely justified. But she sparks off an interesting debate. That's my opinion. What's yours?
______________________________________
*I noticed Jon Danzig, a journalist with acromegaly, took them to task for this in the comments section of the article, good on him!
** I don't know what the collective noun for "a group of people with acromegaly" is, but it should really be this.
***Common misconception: people with acromegaly only become very tall if the condition develops during childhood/adolescence. If it develops in adulthood, it will lead to bone and soft tissue growth but usually won't increase height much, if at all.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
A Lesson From My Former Landlady: Part 2
I know what you're all thinking after yesterday's post. Maybe I was just a genuinely awful tenant and this poor innocent landlady was understandably desperate to get rid of me. Maybe that £65 just barely covered the emotional trauma of having to live with me. Maybe my mere presence in a house creates the kind of dark cloud of horror and despair that nothing but years of intensive therapy can lift.
Well, I admit I wasn't perfect. Due to all my dance classes, I had a very unpredictable pattern of kitchen useage, and I did once manage to lock my boyfriend in the house and trap him there, because I am apparently incapable of understanding how keys work. I wasn't allowed to hoover my room in case it scratched the floor, so I only swept the floor occassionally. Sometimes I would move bags that were left in the middle of the hallway, so that I could get by. I admittedly never cleaned the windows. And I did once keep a friendship cake on the sideboard in the kitchen for almost two weeks - although I feel that offence should be mitigated by the fact that I gave June and her kids several of the resultant cupcakes.
On the other hand, here is a small taster of what it was like living with June:
1. She once went on holiday without warning me at all in advance; I just arrived home to find an email saying she wouldn't be back for a week. This would not have been a problem, except she turned off the heating before leaving and I had no idea how to turn it on, so it was freezing, and she locked away the wireless internet box in a room with no key, meaning that whenever I had problems getting internet access, which happened every now and again, I was unable to reset the wireless and had to just wait until it fixed itself, which could be hours. Oh, and she also left her kid's hamster in the house with no-one to look after it but me. I emailed her back about the above issues and she completely ignored it, even when I texted her as well; I didn't call because I didn't know what country she was in.
Fortunately, after four days, just at the point when the hamster's food was starting to run low and I was starting to think I would have to find something for it to eat, her ex husband rocked up at half nine at night to pick it up, with no warning.
2. The whole house was permanently a huge mess (except for my room in the roof… my room was lovely, that's the only reason I put up with it), particularly the kitchen, where plates of congealed food could lie in state for days. At one point, some mouldy bananas were left hanging up in the kitchen for two weeks. That's two weeks after they'd already gone mouldy.
3. When I moved into my room, one of the curtain fittings was broken and falling off the wall. Despite raising it more than once, it was never fixed. Nor was the door to my kitchen cupboard fixed in the months after one of its hinges detached. Apparently June - a fully grown woman with children of her own - was waiting for her elderly parents to come and fix them.
She also got her parents to come and stay at the house for a week while she went on holiday, so that they could do her gardening. They came and worked in the garden and swept her paths and fixed her fence, and they didn't even see her or their grandchildren. This didn't affect me in any way, I just thought it was a pretty crappy thing for her to do.
4. There was a mysterious and horrible smell coming from the downstairs drains for a couple of months after I moved in. After talking to her about it several times, she finally booked a plumber, without mentioning this to me until two days beforehand. She managed to book him on my day off, when I had been planning a lie in and general lazy day, and informed me that I would need to vacate my room that morning by eight o'clock - earlier than I would usually leave for work. I said that I had booked leave and had been planning a lie in and would have appreciated it if she had checked with me that it would be ok. Her response? "Oh well, it's too late, he's booked now".
5. She kept her Christmas tree up and fully decorated until at least the end of March, when I left. Not really a problem as such, just Very Weird.
I could go on, but I'm bored now. In any case, that's got to be enough for you to see that she wasn't the easiest person to live with. However, I have become a much more patient person in the last few years (except when I'm walking behind slow people. OUT OF MY WAY, SLUGGARDS!)* and I do at least try to think the best of people. Despite all the above, I liked my room, I thought I got on fine with June, I kept myself out of the way and I always made sure I tidied up after myself. Even though my mum and boyfriend** clearly (and accurately) marked her out as a Bit Of A Weirdo after meeting her just once or twice, I really did make the effort. So for her to effectively turn on me for the sake of a measly £65 felt pretty horrible, given the amount of effort and patience I had put into maintaining a good relationship with her.
Even after she had her big shouting fit at me and docked her pound of flesh from my deposit, I was naive enough to assume that would be that. I had previously provided her with my new address so she could forward any post; I was pretty organised with getting my address updated with various organisations that write to me, but I've had problems in the past where I've called the hospital and given them a new address, only for them to fail to change their records and continue sending stuff to my old address, so I wanted to be safe. I assumed everything was fine.
This week, I suddenly realised I had failed to provide the professional body that I'm a member of with my new address. They don't usually send me much, but I emailed them anyway. I was impressed when, two days later, they sent me a magazine to my new address. Until I looked at it and realised that it had previously been sent to my old address at June's house. Instead of forwarding it to the address I had supplied her with, she had marked it "Not known at this address, return to sender." Obviously the professional body had received it back and been waiting to get my new address so they could re-send it.
But what a horribly petty, vindictive thing for June to do. She knows my new address perfectly well; writing it on the envelope before sticking it back in the mail would take no more effort than writing "return to sender" before sticking it back in the mail. Fortunately she's chosen to do that with a magazine that's not important. But what if it had been medical information sent to me by the hospital? It's not going to come in an envelope marked "important medical info for Emer, please don't dick around with this".
I had decided to put my previous encounter with June to the back of my mind, but this upset me all over again - because now I'm worried that the hospital could have sent me a letter which I haven't received thanks to her childish behaviour. I have no idea why she would choose to behave towards me in this way. Presumably it hasn't even occurred to her that messing around with someone's mail could have serious consequences - or else it has occurred to her, and she really doesn't care. Maybe that was the only bit of mail that she's done this with, and she just wanted to make some kind of point - but I can't know that for sure.
I'm hoping that, as I spoke to my endocrinologist yesterday, he would have seen any problems with my address on the hospital system and mentioned it, and I will call and check that they have the correct address for me now. But I don't know what to do about June. Part of me really doesn't want to let this go; I think she should be made aware of how serious her actions could be. But equally, I have no desire to have any contact with her ever again. I'm worried if I email or write to her, I might just make things worse - but I do think that telling her about my illness might give her a bit of a wake-up call regarding her behaviour.
Any suggestions?
__________________________________________________
* Is sluggard actually a word? It should be. Answers on a postcard, please.
** Some of the few people to have met her - for the most part I didn't invite people to the house because I was embarassed that the kitchen etc. was so horrible
Well, I admit I wasn't perfect. Due to all my dance classes, I had a very unpredictable pattern of kitchen useage, and I did once manage to lock my boyfriend in the house and trap him there, because I am apparently incapable of understanding how keys work. I wasn't allowed to hoover my room in case it scratched the floor, so I only swept the floor occassionally. Sometimes I would move bags that were left in the middle of the hallway, so that I could get by. I admittedly never cleaned the windows. And I did once keep a friendship cake on the sideboard in the kitchen for almost two weeks - although I feel that offence should be mitigated by the fact that I gave June and her kids several of the resultant cupcakes.
On the other hand, here is a small taster of what it was like living with June:
1. She once went on holiday without warning me at all in advance; I just arrived home to find an email saying she wouldn't be back for a week. This would not have been a problem, except she turned off the heating before leaving and I had no idea how to turn it on, so it was freezing, and she locked away the wireless internet box in a room with no key, meaning that whenever I had problems getting internet access, which happened every now and again, I was unable to reset the wireless and had to just wait until it fixed itself, which could be hours. Oh, and she also left her kid's hamster in the house with no-one to look after it but me. I emailed her back about the above issues and she completely ignored it, even when I texted her as well; I didn't call because I didn't know what country she was in.
Fortunately, after four days, just at the point when the hamster's food was starting to run low and I was starting to think I would have to find something for it to eat, her ex husband rocked up at half nine at night to pick it up, with no warning.
2. The whole house was permanently a huge mess (except for my room in the roof… my room was lovely, that's the only reason I put up with it), particularly the kitchen, where plates of congealed food could lie in state for days. At one point, some mouldy bananas were left hanging up in the kitchen for two weeks. That's two weeks after they'd already gone mouldy.
3. When I moved into my room, one of the curtain fittings was broken and falling off the wall. Despite raising it more than once, it was never fixed. Nor was the door to my kitchen cupboard fixed in the months after one of its hinges detached. Apparently June - a fully grown woman with children of her own - was waiting for her elderly parents to come and fix them.
She also got her parents to come and stay at the house for a week while she went on holiday, so that they could do her gardening. They came and worked in the garden and swept her paths and fixed her fence, and they didn't even see her or their grandchildren. This didn't affect me in any way, I just thought it was a pretty crappy thing for her to do.
4. There was a mysterious and horrible smell coming from the downstairs drains for a couple of months after I moved in. After talking to her about it several times, she finally booked a plumber, without mentioning this to me until two days beforehand. She managed to book him on my day off, when I had been planning a lie in and general lazy day, and informed me that I would need to vacate my room that morning by eight o'clock - earlier than I would usually leave for work. I said that I had booked leave and had been planning a lie in and would have appreciated it if she had checked with me that it would be ok. Her response? "Oh well, it's too late, he's booked now".
5. She kept her Christmas tree up and fully decorated until at least the end of March, when I left. Not really a problem as such, just Very Weird.
I could go on, but I'm bored now. In any case, that's got to be enough for you to see that she wasn't the easiest person to live with. However, I have become a much more patient person in the last few years (except when I'm walking behind slow people. OUT OF MY WAY, SLUGGARDS!)* and I do at least try to think the best of people. Despite all the above, I liked my room, I thought I got on fine with June, I kept myself out of the way and I always made sure I tidied up after myself. Even though my mum and boyfriend** clearly (and accurately) marked her out as a Bit Of A Weirdo after meeting her just once or twice, I really did make the effort. So for her to effectively turn on me for the sake of a measly £65 felt pretty horrible, given the amount of effort and patience I had put into maintaining a good relationship with her.
Even after she had her big shouting fit at me and docked her pound of flesh from my deposit, I was naive enough to assume that would be that. I had previously provided her with my new address so she could forward any post; I was pretty organised with getting my address updated with various organisations that write to me, but I've had problems in the past where I've called the hospital and given them a new address, only for them to fail to change their records and continue sending stuff to my old address, so I wanted to be safe. I assumed everything was fine.
This week, I suddenly realised I had failed to provide the professional body that I'm a member of with my new address. They don't usually send me much, but I emailed them anyway. I was impressed when, two days later, they sent me a magazine to my new address. Until I looked at it and realised that it had previously been sent to my old address at June's house. Instead of forwarding it to the address I had supplied her with, she had marked it "Not known at this address, return to sender." Obviously the professional body had received it back and been waiting to get my new address so they could re-send it.
But what a horribly petty, vindictive thing for June to do. She knows my new address perfectly well; writing it on the envelope before sticking it back in the mail would take no more effort than writing "return to sender" before sticking it back in the mail. Fortunately she's chosen to do that with a magazine that's not important. But what if it had been medical information sent to me by the hospital? It's not going to come in an envelope marked "important medical info for Emer, please don't dick around with this".
I had decided to put my previous encounter with June to the back of my mind, but this upset me all over again - because now I'm worried that the hospital could have sent me a letter which I haven't received thanks to her childish behaviour. I have no idea why she would choose to behave towards me in this way. Presumably it hasn't even occurred to her that messing around with someone's mail could have serious consequences - or else it has occurred to her, and she really doesn't care. Maybe that was the only bit of mail that she's done this with, and she just wanted to make some kind of point - but I can't know that for sure.
I'm hoping that, as I spoke to my endocrinologist yesterday, he would have seen any problems with my address on the hospital system and mentioned it, and I will call and check that they have the correct address for me now. But I don't know what to do about June. Part of me really doesn't want to let this go; I think she should be made aware of how serious her actions could be. But equally, I have no desire to have any contact with her ever again. I'm worried if I email or write to her, I might just make things worse - but I do think that telling her about my illness might give her a bit of a wake-up call regarding her behaviour.
Any suggestions?
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* Is sluggard actually a word? It should be. Answers on a postcard, please.
** Some of the few people to have met her - for the most part I didn't invite people to the house because I was embarassed that the kitchen etc. was so horrible
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
More Expensive Than Uranium
I have two GPs who I see on a semi-regular basis; both excellent medical men in their way, but both with certain personal quirks that turn my regular visits from dull routine into amusing interludes. The first,* Dr. Ken, has a curious habit of continually saying "mmhm, mmhm, mmhm, mmhm" whilst you speak to him (I have actually discussed this with another patient, so I know it's not just me).
Initially, I assumed he must have gorged on peanut butter before letting me in to his office, and the curious masticating noise was the sound of him trying to detach it from the roof of his mouth. I have since been forced to revise this view, however, and now my best guess is that at some point as a medical student he must have gone on some kind of "relating to patients" course and believes that frequent low-level humming noises are a soothing way of indicating his interest and concern, and not just extremely irritating.
My other GP, Boris, has never made any unexpected murmurs, susurrations, sighs, soughs or rumbles - which is to his credit. However, he does have a somewhat quirky sense of humour; last year, when receiving my regular blood test results, he gravely informed me I was pregnant and then burst into hysterical peals of laughter. Fortunately, due to a) being used to him and b) being extremely sure I was not, I did actually find it funny, but I imagine he needs to be careful precisely who he pulls that joke on.
Today I visited Dr. Boris to get my prescription for Somatuline Autogel injections, as agreed with my endocrinologist. He looked it up in his little dictionary of medicines, looked up at me and said, "Did you know this is more expensive than uranium?"***
Never having previously considered the price of uranium (as I am neither a nuclear scientist nor intent on causing mass terror) - and slightly concerned that my GP knew the exact cost of uranium yet had to look up my medication in a book - I asked him how he knew. Apparently the food critic, Giles Coren, recently wrote a bit of a rant about Pizza Express, in which he calculated that the price they charge for extra olives makes the olives, gram for gram, more expensive than uranium - which, I imagine, means that my lanreotide injections are significantly more expensive than uranium.
I can't guarantee that this story is true, and I foolishly didn't think to ask whether this valuation applied to enriched, depleted or farm-fresh newly-mined uranium. I can't look it up now, of course; I imagine that researching current uranium prices may well attract The Wrong Kind Of Attention. Probably just using the word "uranium" six times in one blog post is bad enough.
Anyway, I got my prescription and Dr. Boris instructed me that, should I be mugged whilst transferring the lanreotide injection from the pharmacy to the GP's surgery, I may hand over my purse and phone - but I have to fight them for the syringe.
_________________________________________________________________
*I won't name them, obviously, as I have no wish to get sued. Let's call them Ken and Boris, for no reason other than that they are excellent names and that both my doctors have extreme political views at opposing ends of the spectrum.**
**N.B. this is a lie.
***I have cost the NHS an awful lot more than I've ever paid in taxes >.>
Initially, I assumed he must have gorged on peanut butter before letting me in to his office, and the curious masticating noise was the sound of him trying to detach it from the roof of his mouth. I have since been forced to revise this view, however, and now my best guess is that at some point as a medical student he must have gone on some kind of "relating to patients" course and believes that frequent low-level humming noises are a soothing way of indicating his interest and concern, and not just extremely irritating.
My other GP, Boris, has never made any unexpected murmurs, susurrations, sighs, soughs or rumbles - which is to his credit. However, he does have a somewhat quirky sense of humour; last year, when receiving my regular blood test results, he gravely informed me I was pregnant and then burst into hysterical peals of laughter. Fortunately, due to a) being used to him and b) being extremely sure I was not, I did actually find it funny, but I imagine he needs to be careful precisely who he pulls that joke on.
Today I visited Dr. Boris to get my prescription for Somatuline Autogel injections, as agreed with my endocrinologist. He looked it up in his little dictionary of medicines, looked up at me and said, "Did you know this is more expensive than uranium?"***
Never having previously considered the price of uranium (as I am neither a nuclear scientist nor intent on causing mass terror) - and slightly concerned that my GP knew the exact cost of uranium yet had to look up my medication in a book - I asked him how he knew. Apparently the food critic, Giles Coren, recently wrote a bit of a rant about Pizza Express, in which he calculated that the price they charge for extra olives makes the olives, gram for gram, more expensive than uranium - which, I imagine, means that my lanreotide injections are significantly more expensive than uranium.
I can't guarantee that this story is true, and I foolishly didn't think to ask whether this valuation applied to enriched, depleted or farm-fresh newly-mined uranium. I can't look it up now, of course; I imagine that researching current uranium prices may well attract The Wrong Kind Of Attention. Probably just using the word "uranium" six times in one blog post is bad enough.
Anyway, I got my prescription and Dr. Boris instructed me that, should I be mugged whilst transferring the lanreotide injection from the pharmacy to the GP's surgery, I may hand over my purse and phone - but I have to fight them for the syringe.
_________________________________________________________________
*I won't name them, obviously, as I have no wish to get sued. Let's call them Ken and Boris, for no reason other than that they are excellent names and that both my doctors have extreme political views at opposing ends of the spectrum.**
**N.B. this is a lie.
***I have cost the NHS an awful lot more than I've ever paid in taxes >.>
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