"Operation for appendicitis at QMC"

Thank you for the opportunity to say how I feel about my spell of being in hospital. I was first ill on 15th November '08 with constipation, which I don't normally suffer from. On the 30th, I was violently sick and going to the toilet frequently. For a week after that, I had lost my appetite and, on 7th December, I was feeling sick again and running to the toilet with terrible pains in my stomach. My husband then took me to a walk-in centre, where after I was examined, the doctor suspected that I had either food poisoning or appendicitis. I was given tablets and then went home to bed for 3 or 4 hours. I was still in lots of pain, so my husband rang back the walk-in centre and they advised him to take me to A&E at the QMC.

I was taken care of very well in A&E and it wasn't too long before I was in a bed on ward E14. The doctor came to see me and said that he would operate that night. The next morning, the nurse brought me a bowl of water to wash in and left me to it, which was a real struggle as I was in so much pain. After a day or two my drip ran out and it took the nurses 7 hours to replace it, which I thought was far too long. On the wednesday I went for a CT scan - I was taken down by a nurse from another ward who encouraged me to drink the fluid quick with great difficulty. When I got back to the ward they found that the CT scan nurse had made a mess of putting the needle in my arm so I had to have this replaced by a doctor. When the doctor then put antibiotics into my arm via injection, he missed the vein and my arm blew up to trwice its normal size. It took 3 attempts for the doctor to, eventually, correctly place the needle.

I would just like to say thank you to Dr Maxwell Armstrong who did the operation - he was very good and very kind.