They Burst My Bubble, But I Fixed It

I was in the zone, writing, writing, writing, and then a letter arrived from the hospital saying that I had to head off to the city for a scan tomorrow. Tomorrow! Since I knew that I'm not due back there until March, this was either Bad News or a load of hooey. I was guessing it was the latter because I figured (hoped) someone would have informed me if it was the former.

Anyway, this is not a good time of the year for dealing with hospitals - everyone who possibly can is on holidays (usually the competent people the hospital want to keep happy) and rosters are up the creek - but I bravely embarked upon the endeavour. I won't bore you with the details, but simply say it involved a lot of toing and froing between staff who either didn't have a clue or didn't give a flying fig. Finally, I left a message with my usual medicos and then sat around waiting for a response. When they did get back to me, I was informed that my hooey theory was entirely correct. Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out.

When you get swallowed up by any sort of human system or institution, you really have to question what's going on. I worked in hospitals for over 12 years, and I can tell you that a passive patient can end up a dead patient. Anomalies left unchallenged can have big knock-on effects. Not because of evil intent or gross incompetence, but because some people are good at their jobs, but many are not, and others simply don't care. If you're a people-watcher, hospitals are both fascinating with their life-and-death dramas involving people of great dedication, smartness and superhuman efficiency, but also terrifying in that you can end up on dysfunctional wards where the either staff can't leave their personal lives at the door on the way in and the patient is viewed as the least important and most annoying part of the daily routine, or the place is a war zone full of bickering workers. Good material for soap operas, not so good if you're the one flat on your back in bed with tubes coming out of all your orifices. Neglect, passivity, fear of authority, back-stabbing teams, laziness, incompetence, miscommunication, all the usual interpersonal relationship problems that you get in any badly managed office also apply to badly run hospitals, but unfortunately their mistakes involve flesh and blood humans and can result in unnecessary funerals. So if you end up in hospital, question, question, question. Be a nuisance and live.

Ah well, it's done now. I can get back into my writing head space and keep on holidaying tomorrow. Yay! I did get to look over and  submit another 3 stories whilst waiting for my callbacks, so the morning hasn't been a complete waste. Now I'll hit the keyboard for a few hours of catchups. Big SF story, here I come.