This story begins at a little after 3am this morning. I’m going to use my tweets to tell the first part of it, covering the period up until around 7:50am.
It took a few minutes and several callbacks to get through and then I spent a little more time in a queue, with nervousness building. The surgery receptionists are generally fierce on the phone, less so in person, but I was delighted to be answered by one who is pleasant on the phone. I’d been advised to call today at 8 to try to obtain an ‘on the day appointment’ with my GP.
This GP is new to me, I have seen him just twice to date – in December ’16 and January this year. My previous GP, also male, replaced my great GP of a couple of years in April 2016 when she moved to another city. He is, as she was, the only one of this large practice’s many GPs to work full time, readily accessible pretty much at the drop of a hat. Appointments with the rest are like gold dust, as I’m sure is the case elsewhere.
I was really keen to remain with my great GP’s replacement primarily because of the accessibility issue but it wasn’t to be. Great GP was renown for her lovely manner, efficiency and proactive approach, which very much suited me, myself Mrs Proactive. Her replacement is probably in his early thirties. He’s mild mannered and has a lovely soothing voice with an Irish lilt and was always willing to make himself available to me – with the exception of a home visit in an emergency last year. However, he is far from proactive, is reactive only after a fashion, and is prone to moaning about the hardships of his lot as a GP. Don’t get me wrong, I utterly sympathise. I know that the NHS is terribly s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d and I’m certain that the majority of GPs are greatly stressed and more than earn their salaries. I hope that many are wholly patient-centred. With appointments scarce and often limited to eight or 10 minutes, I think that time is for the patient not the doctor’s own grumbles.
A good relationship with a GP is vital if you’re ill, of course. This goes double when you’re chronically ill – when your illness is enduring and you often have complex needs. Health impacts beyond the mind and body, lives can be disrupted even devastated by health problems. In the UK, GPs are the gateway to all other services within the NHS and are also generally necessary to the process of obtaining things such as welfare payments and social care – both of which have also been subject to budget cuts and as a result are increasingly difficult to obtain. There are no guarantees of need being met. A good GP in your corner is a wondrous thing.
I’ll write in another post about how I’ve been unable in the last year or so, to obtain NHS support and treatment in the form of physiotherapy, trauma therapy, treatment for an eating disorder and support to deal with the onset and acute impact of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I’ll keep this post to the difficulties I’ve experienced in accessing a GP.
In September 2016, I was referred, for the first time in my life, to what is known as an Intensive Home Treatment Team (IHTT), they used to be known as ‘crisis teams’. Essentially, it’s the community version of in patient psychiatric care, designed to keep you out of hospital. The reasons for that referral, the process leading up to it and my general experience of the IHTT warrants a separate post. I’ll confine myself here to detailing my final experience of the team because of the profound impact it had on me, my health and my ability to access my GP and other services.
I was due to be discharged in early November. The service is a short term one, designed to deal with the most severe crises, those which put someone at risk. However, discharge is known to sometimes be unduly hastened due to the paucity of available resources as a result of under-funding. This particular team came in for criticism recently when a young patient died by suicide immediately after being discharged without further support in place. I already struggle with concerns about being a burden but further felt pressured to be OK when I really was not. The day before my planned discharge I considered. I knew that I was still at risk because further appropriate support had not been put in place. I was fighting to keep myself safe. I felt that it would better to speak up ahead of discharge, rather than afterwards when I would then likely have to go through the whole referral and assessment process again – no doubt generating bundles of paperwork – if I were to access the team again.
A Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN) visited me on the day of discharge. She had visited once before and unlike with the rest of the team I’d found myself feeling wary of her. I pushed myself to plough on. I calmly explained, although not without cost, how I was feeling and the difficulties I was experiencing then. I revealed great detail about the horrible depths of my eating disorder, she is still the only person to whom I’ve revealed those details. She seemed quite nice about it, promised much action to get further support in place and said that my discharge was now on hold. She told me she’d call me the following morning with updates. It was early evening the next day before I heard anything when I received a curt call from the team secretary telling me that two team members were on their way to see me. They arrived moments later. I knew as soon as I opened the door to them that something was very wrong. There were no pleasantries and the pair, the same CPN together with a male support worker I’d seen a few times, were openly hostile. The support worker was openly aggressive. I was utterly bewildered. It transpired that they didn’t believe what I had told the CPN the previous day. They called me a fraud and implied that I was a liar and the support worker told lies about previous statements that he had made to me, about something the team psychiatrist had said to me about a referral to the eating disorders service, and about further support. I was appalled and visibly very distressed, almost unheard of for a woman with a compulsive ‘brave front’ who finds crying difficult, something that they knew.
I need to see my GP as soon as possible for a number of reasons, not least because my physical health has very much deteriorated because of the other issues I’ve been facing. The experience with the crisis team left me terrified that GPs, none of which now really know me, would also disbelieve and dismiss me. I became terrified at the thought of further mistreatment when I was already on my knees and fighting for my life. I know that those of my ‘mental health friends’ who’ve had similar experiences will relate to that last sentence. I’m never entirely comfortable saying that I’m ‘fighting for my life’. That’s not because I don’t believe the statement to be true but I know that while society accepts cancer, as an example, as a life threatening illness, very many are unwilling to accept that mental illness is often life threatening. Many still see suicide as a choice. I am pretty ‘gung-ho’ but no matter what I could not push through this fear. I didn’t give up and it’s taken a lot of work, various actions, to get to this point. Of course, had I not been handed hope this weekend I couldn’t have achieved this today regardless.
That whole experience with the IHTT was somehow surreal, in that I could not believe that health professionals, particularly ones working with people at risk, could behave so unprofessionally and without regard to their duty of care. This is the first time I’ve written about this experience, it was six weeks after it happened before I could speak about it. It’s only now that I am beginning to be able to discuss what happened in any detail. I won’t discuss here how I felt in reaction to it, except to say that I felt dirty among other things and I hadn’t felt that way since being abused as a young person. I told only my ex-husband who I rang after asking the IHTT workers to leave. I was very polite but firm, they were doing a lot of damage and were clearly unable to either recognise that or care about it. I was distraught and I knew I needed to do that to protect myself.
I rang my ex in utter despair, not knowing where else to turn, speaking to him helped a little, and at least I began to manage to step back from immediate thoughts of suicide and start to continue on.
When my call to the GP surgery was answered this morning all appointments with my GP today had been booked. The next bookable appointment was on Monday 26th. I also had the option to phone again tomorrow at 8am and try for an on the day appointment. Until two days ago, I hadn’t been able to leave my flat for four months due to a combination of PTSD and Complex Trauma symptoms and issues including pain and fatigue affecting my mobility. Ideally, at this time, I need someone to accompany me to the surgery and back home again to ensure I’m safe from falls and such. This is not impossible to arrange but is proving very difficult. A friend has generously agreed to help but, through no fault on her part, has limited availability.
With notes to read otherwise my nerves would have made me incoherent, I rang the surgery again in ‘speaking time’ later this morning – a daily slot when patients can call in and speak to their own GP, if available, or to the duty doctor of the day. Mercifully, I was able to be put straight through to my GP. He received a letter in early May expressing acute concern about my mental health from my newly allocated social worker. He wrote me a letter a week later telling me to make an appointment with him if I needed one. I started by saying that the social worker had been right to be concerned and that my health has been generally poor since February. I explained that I’ve had difficulty in getting to see him for a number of reasons, most recently because of the scarcity of appointments (I did say I wasn’t complaining about that) and because of the issue of needing to be accompanied. I asked politely, clearly and directly if it would be possible to make time for a 10 minute catch up over the phone. He didn’t answer, or offer a home visit as I know Great GP would have done, but said that he’d book me an appointment on Thursday at 10, that I could tell my friend and that he’d hope to see me then, that was it.
My friend is not able to accompany me on Thursday as she will be at a conference out of the area. I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to ask my advocacy worker to sit in on the appointment with me. She is not able to do the escorting to and from bit, but I’m wondering if I can get myself to the surgery in a taxi, which I was planning to do anyway as a one off, whether if I was to become too unwell afterwards she’d be allowed to make an exception and see me home. If not, my friend has offered to ask a friend of hers to accompany me if possible. So, a couple of options there, we’ll see what transpires.
With regards to the rest of the day, I need to do a laundry load – I have an underwear crisis, I need to run the dishwasher, place an online grocery order and compose a couple of vital emails including a reply to my social worker’s message of Friday. I would like to take some time to reacquaint myself with my art journal. ‘Spoons’, as ever, will dictate for the most part. I know, especially given my disrupted night, that I’ve already scaled mountains today and I’m very pleased about that.
Thanks for reading. See you anon.
Heart x
N.B. I have taken steps to begin the process of making a complaint about the actions of the IHTT. That’s what lead me to an advocacy worker.
My heart is set on living ... 