Tag Archives: screening

A Tricky Conversation

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I’m in a position where I have so much to write about that I’m getting jammed.

That’s a good start. I had a letter on Monday night when I got home. I recognised it as an NHS letter and my heart sank. More nanny-state, bureaucratic nonsense, I thought. I’ve only just done the AAA Screening and have nothing else due. What do they want now?

It seems they want me for Lung Cancer Screening.

In a letter dated last Wednesday and delivered on Monday, they gave me a date for a screening appointment – Tuesday. That’s right, less than 24 hours notice. I wonder which management guru has just been paid a fortune to come up with this strategy.

Theoretically it probably stops people changing appointments, but in practical terms it’s a nightmare. Fortunately it was a phone appointment so I could let it go ahead, but it wasn’t very convenient.

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

For instance, I work in a shop with two other people, is that a good environment for discussing medical matters, some of which are better kept confidential? And I work in a shop with a lot of valuable, shiny items, do I want to give out my home address if we have members of the public in the shop? The answer in both cases is, of course, no.

I would rather have done it on Wednesday when I’m not at work. Or before 8.00 or after 4.00, but this is the NHS we’re talking about. Apart from the nurses and ambulance drivers most of them don’t work out of office hours.  If I was organising this sort of thing I would certainly be looking at the practicality of contacting people in the evenings. At flu time our local surgery is happy to work on Saturdays – because they know this is a good time to gather large numbers together.

It all went as expected. I answered questions, some of which had nothing to do with the health of my lungs, and, because I used to smoke heavily, I was told, in the manner of a TV host delivering news of a prize, that I had won a second screening appointment and would be allowed to answer more questions at an inconvenient location in order to decide if I was to be given the star prize of a trip in a CT Scanner.

What annoys me is that they have all the information they need on my smoking habits and my family cancer history because of my previous biopsies. They don’t need to ring up and bother me with all this malarky.

Ah well, another day, another NHS story . . .

I feel more like I’m being pursued rather than cured.

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Holiday Day 3 Part 2 Me v the NHS

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This is about day 3 but written on Day 4. Day 4 will follow later.

Yesterday I went for my Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) Screening. It’s a free NHS service available to men at the age of 65. It used to be 67 (which was when I first heard of it, when one of the shop customers warned me about it as one of the signs of ageing).

To have the procedure you first have to sit in a temporary waiting room with notices sellotaped to the wall. One of the notices details the terms and conditions of how they will treat your records and tells you that if you don’t agree to them you can’t have the screening and they will report this to your GP. This rather ominous start to the process would benefit from a redesign. I have found before that although they employ thousands of clerical staff in the NHS they don’t seem to have anyone capable of communicating in a cheery and welcoming manner.

After sitting around for a bit, comparing how old I looked compared to the others in the room, I came to the conclusion that I was looking about average for a 65-year-old and that none of them had facial hair. It’s something I have noticed before. I was unusual in my generation for having a beard, though in later generations it has become widespread. Just an observation . . .

 

None of them had tattoos either. That’s something else that we didn’t do, but the younger generation does.

And none of us was staring at the screen of a  mobile phone.

I’ll stop the list now.

I was then taken along to a room where I had to answer some undemanding questions (name, address, date of birth, ethnicity and whether I had read the leaflets they had sent me.) I failed the last one as I hadn’t, but I had looked at the pictures so I had the general idea.

Then I was made to lie down on a bed where my feet hung off the end whilst the lady spread me with gel and kept prodding me with the thing they use for scanning. I haven’t a clue what they would call it. Maybe a probe (though that sounds a bit intrusive) or a scanner (though that might be confused with  other sorts of scanning technology) r even a wand. It was a bit wand shaped. It appears that my aorta was not easy to find. It seemed to take a long time. However, she was persistent and tactful and never mentioned my girth.

There are four results. One is that you are fine with no abnormalities and can be signed off, never to be seen again. One is that you have signs causing concern. Aneurysms grow slowly so you get another scan in 12 months to check. If you have more signs causing concern they have you back every three months. The fourth is that you have cause for major concern, in which case they hand you over to the medical team who will, in the worst cases, operate.

I am in category one and have been signed off. It’s a good result. Three monthly checks would have been very annoying, probably more annoying than the operation. The visits would be made even worse by the chaotic nature of the parking and the unhelpful maps and (incorrect and contradictory) information on the website.

It rained as I left and, being in shirt sleeves, I got soaked in the 200 yards walking (slowly) to the car. I then had to find the exit, drive past it and do a three point turn to face the correct angle to get out. Still, it could have been worse. It’s always good to get away from hospital without having to take your trousers off.