"A horrible experience"

Part of me didn’t want to give feedback as it meant reliving the horrible experience I had. 

Had to go to A&E Ninewells for a cyst that caused havoc to my system. Staff in A&E were great. The nurses in Ward 7 in Ninewells were also very helpful, caring and professional and couldn’t have done more to help me. 

I was moved to ward 8 after surgery and that is when the worst 9 days of my life happened. 

The first day in ward 8 the nurses and staff were quite good. But when a different senior nurse started that’s when it took a turn for the worse for me. 

The head nurse asked me on a scale of zero to giving child birth what my pain rating was. Being a man and not able to give birth, I said in a very obvious tone that childbirth couldn’t be that painful so I rated my pain a 7 compared to childbirth. 

Well after that, no 4 hours of intravenous antibiotics for me that day. No pain killers and I wanted someone to look at my chart because of all of this so had a friend come over the next day who is a nurse to check my chart and they had wrote on my chart that I was  off the ward for that day when I was stuck in bed extremely unwell and in agony.

That day the infection spread from mid way to my hip all the way round to my hip in a day and the night shift had to give me my day's antibiotics as they started the change over. The day shift weren’t even gone and the night shift staff were on the ball doing what the day shift should have done.

A day after, when the infection was clearly worse and getting out of control, this nurse realised what they had done and how fast the infection spread and all of a sudden started trying to be my best friend for the rest of the week. 

I heard the younger nurses talking about holidays and making vomiting noises which everyone could hear and saying they were going to get effed up when they go on holiday. 

I had dressings thrown at me when I was laying in bed and told to put them on myself when I can’t see behind me. After constantly asking the nurse to put the dressing on, eventually they did but used what I feel was extreme force in what I think was an attempt to make sure I never asked again. One nurse shouted at me because I had my dressings changed but then had to go to the bathroom after being constipated for 5 days. 

My IV was coming out, told a nurse so they stormed over, put both hands on my wrist and stabbed it back in and it popped out. When I mentioned it, the nurse walked away and said someone else will sort it. That caused my forearm to swell up as they had stabbed it past the vein. 

I heard the head nurse say someone was full of sh** when they went to the shops. 

Urine samples went missing and I felt that half of the nurses were very moody and chatted amongst themselves more than they actually went about doing paperwork or helping people, leaving it up to the night shift. 

That’s an extremely short version of what happened in just over a week, there were very good nurses on the night shift taking care of everyone and a couple of good ones working during the day.