You may have noticed that I have moved back to WordPress for my hosting and that there have been some new posts on the site in recent days. I would love to say that I have found a renewed interest in sharing my thoughts, but alas the situation has been forced upon me.

About 8 weeks ago I started feeling dizzy when standing up and lightheaded most of the day. I initially put it down to a balance problem I had had a few years buck, but it persisted and was getting worse so I made an appointment with my GP. The process for booking an appointment in 2024 involved logging on to the surgery website at a very specific time, 7AM, and completing the form as quickly as you can to get a call back. Two days in a row I was advised half way through that the appointment slots for the day were full so I had to try again the next morning.

Eventually I got an appointment and visited my GP. The appointment took about 40 minutes and I came away believing that it was indeed a balance issue, but a blood test was booked and I was sent home.

The blood test came back as largely OK with some borderline results and advice to eat more bananas because my potassium was low, but the symptoms were getting worse and I was now experiencing palpitations and feeling exhausted by early afternoon each day. Bananas were not going to sort this…

I contacted the GP again who booked an ECG which was done within 2 days. He spoke to me the same day and advised that I had atrial fibrillation and that he wanted to immediately put me on blood thinners. He also asked if I had private healthcare because, and I quote, the NHS would be too slow.

When at home my wife spoke to my sister in law who is a specialist in ECG scans- she looked at the scan the GP had given me and immediately said ‘That is not atrial fibrillation’. A call was booked with the private GP in the morning, a service my employer offers, and so I waited.

The next morning I explained my symptoms and what had happened, and she told me to end the call and go straight to A&E. She advised that I needed urgent tests and that by doing it this way it is the only way to get anything moving.

An hour later I was seen within 10 minutes and another ECG was taken alongside another blood test. Over a period of 6 hours I had multiple tests including a chest x-ray, more bloods, many more ECGs and finally a chat with the consultant.

They could not seem to pinpoint the problem and so asked for a heart monitor to be worn for a period of time and a more advanced scan to be done. It finally felt like something was being sorted, but today I am still 5 days away from the advanced scan and have only just finished wearing the monitor.

My symptoms have got markedly worse over the past few days and I can now barely walk any distance without losing my breath. Left-sided chest pain is becoming more common and yet I have to wait. And even this is not the big problem here because once the scans are done I have to rely on a consultant finding the time to read them and to decide the next course of action.

I can’t go into too many details, but needlessly to say I am aware that this could take some time if not pushed and that even those in the NHS with close relatives who are sick are now absolutely not allowed to look up their results and help out. I suspect this is because as the service has declined more and more NHS employees have resorted to doing this.

I am now off work currently, needlessly because this should have been sorted some time ago, and I am going stir crazy. I need to work and to keep myself occupied, but it reached the point that I simply had to stop because of how I am feeling. And this is why I have posted some thoughts to keep my mind occupied.

The working theory is that I have some kind of heart block, but in 2024 in the NHS I have to wait to understand what is wrong and what can be done. Worryingly, there must be many people much sicker than I am who are having to wait and who do not have the ability or confidence to really push things, and I can only presume that some die. The NHS, and in particular A&E, is now a service to see someone, send them home and hope nothing goes wrong before they eventually test them properly.

Without being overly dramatic, my symptoms are getting much worse and I am fully expecting to end up in A&E again over the next few days. My plan is to have the tests done and to then go private to get the results looked at quickly, and to then have whatever it is fixed.

It just amazes me that I can sit here today feeling genuinely scared about what my future is and how long it is, and that there are thousands more people going through this every day in potentially worse positions. It’s remarkable how far we have fallen…

Categories: Articles, Health, Thoughts