Nurses told my partner, the inpatient, that a room might be available on Friday. Today is Wednesday. Just the mention of sleeping in a bed in a small dorm with three other people provokes a phobia-like response. So she’ll be on chairs in the main ward until then. Tonight will be her 11th night not in a bed.
I go from angry to numb. Then there’s that broken smithereen shard of hope. Perhaps by the time the next email I’ve sent or the next letter is written, she’ll be in that room and she can finally sleep and relax. My instinct is that official complaints don’t speed things up, but maybe I’ve left it too late to make a difference.
Everything gets pressured before the weekend, because staff and patients know that doctors and supervisors won’t be around until the following week. Ask anyone admitted on a Thursday, whether or not their needs were met before the Wednesday of the following week. I’m guessing that in most cases the answer is “no”. Prove, me, wrong.
She had a ward round today. They’re talking about sending her home at the end of next week. I don’t believe that any recuperation or respite has yet occurred. She will still be really suicidal. There’s talk of something called “bounce back”. The doctor was basically saying that there’s a chance that she may become very unwell again when back at home. When staff say this you think that you’ll allowed back into hospital. Prior to this admission to hospital this notion was totally contradicted by at least one LPNHST worker - a member of some sort new triage service (a crisis team who work with police). Basically you can’t just refer yourself back to hospital when you feel like it, not now, and any staff that were suggesting that to you could shouldn’t have, etc. In Jo’s case, you can’t even ask for help and get it, and even with a police escort you can be turned away.
Yesterday we needed to know if her LAMP advocate had sent a letter to the hospital managers before going on holiday. It was evening so we sent an email - based on the address on their website. The email bounced back this morning. She was too tired and anxious today to phone LAMP. I didn’t hear from her until around 5pm. LAMP hours are 9-4 - which is pretty good for a charity based organisation. The LAMP advocate had originally told us that putting in official complaints can be problematic (due to some sort 25 day response time), so I did not want to proceed until I knew that all other options had been explored. I leave a message on an answer-phone. The problem for me as a carer/next-of-kin/partner is that mental health advocates have to work directly with their client, going through me defeats the purpose of unbiased advocacy. If this patient is too anxious to ring the advocacy service and the emails ping back then we’re a bit screwed, unless of course we catch a LAMP rep in the building at a later date. But hey, apparently we’re very lucky to have such a service in this county. Count our blessings.
We’re always so very very lucky. For example, she’s told that she is lucky that she’s alive after the overdose, she’s told that she’s lucky that they found a place on a ward that’s only 2-3 buses from her home. We’re lucky that there was a place on a ward at all. We’re so lucky. And they wonder why she daren’t ask for help and weeps to them that she’s some sort of a burden. Yes, we’re so lucky that she sometimes has access to care that she is entitled to. She wants to be dead, she thinks she’s failed, she doesn’t feel lucky at all, deal with it. The availability of beds should never be the patient’s problem.
Apparently her swollen legs with the cracked, weeping skin, have benefited greatly from one day of bandages. I doubt this. What further miracles do they have up their short uniformed sleeves?
I’ll type about the missed opportunities to admit my partner to hospital prior to the massive overdose in a later post. Too wound-up now.
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