"The more I stay at NGH, the more I love..."

What I liked

I liked the fact that I eventually got my way and left the hospital much healthier than I arrived.

The specialist nurse assigned to me was absolutely fantastic, as was the ward manager who seemed to be there for days at a time rather than hours. Those 2 girls were the saviours of the ward. There isn't really much else I can say that was good.

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What could be improved

There was so much wrong about this, I wrote a full account of my first week there from my bed. Many of the nurses just didn't give a damn. i felt a lot of women were ignored simply because they were old. On the other hand I felt I was ignored because i was young. On several occasions I was treated with disgust because "I should be walking by now". I was forced to walk to the toilet by myself then made to wait 10 minutes or more screaming in pain for someone to bring a chair to take me back to bed. After a week of agony, the wrong medication, zero pain scores (I wasn't even asked), I demanded another scan. That's when they found out the operation had gone wrong and i needed another one urgently. Soon after that I began to recover and was allowed home, but left with no medication because I was so desperate to leave at that point and after waiting 4 hours for my drugs they still didn't arrive so I left and my mum collected them for me the next day, even then they sent me the wrong medication. What should have been 1-3 nights turned into 17 horrific nights and a lot of trauma. One year on and I still have nerve damage and a weak spine. I will never fully recover from my experience, neither physically nor mentally.

Anything else?

The bank nurses and night staff should be better vetted. Some of those women would have been better suited to torture chambers. It’s hard to explain but there’s no system there, no solid feeling of support from the staff that would imply that they’re here to care for you. My honest impression through most of that first week was ‘we’ll help you if we think you need it, but you’re young so you probably don’t’. If I needed pain relief I had to fight for it. There wasn't one single occasion when my medication had properly been discussed or my needs had been listened to until I insisted on the second scan. Nobody understood or cared how frightened I was when I could tell things were going so wrong. There is so much more I could say about my stay in hospital, but not enough room to cover even half of it. I hope this gives a fair picture.