And another example of how my local NHS fails epically

After reading a vaguely similar post in customers_suck, I was reminded of this.

Ever since I was legally old enough to babysit, my parents have made use of it whenever they need to go somewhere at short notice. A few weeks ago, they were invited to a work party and when the normal babysitter fell sick, the job went to me.

Of course, it had to be the night when my 7-year-old sister cracked open a glostick and got the stuff in her eye, didn't it? I called a neighbour as I'm still a little young to drive, and we headed up to the local A&E pronto. It was late, we were all shattered and my sister was crying from the pain of still having some of the glostick fluid in her eye, a situation which wasn't helped by the sarcastic attitude of the receptionist when I gave some of the information she asked for wrong. The first doctor we came to was lovely though, efficient, thorough and generally very helpful. The neighbour was sent home to find the glostick (finding which meant my other sister, who was sick, had to wake up and search through the whole upper floor of the house to find it) so they could test to see if it was acidic or alkaline.

So my sister and I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. We'd been promised to be seen within five minutes, but that came and went. The place was hot and stuffy and my sister was restless and in pain. Over the next four hours, we saw several other families in a similar situation to ours- one particular girl was brought in a little while after we arrived. I gave up our seat for her as she looked somewhat peaky, but none of the nurses bothered to even look at her for about half an hour. Five minutes after that, she was in bed on a piece of breathing apparatus and her mother was being called as they were worried she might not get through the night (I think she had meningitis).

The neighbour returned, and we waited some more. At just past midnight (we arrived at eight), my parents arrived- I hadn't been able to get through to them as I had the numbers for their old phones, and the neighbour and I left to find that in the wake of lax parking lot security, his car window had been smashed in.

The icing on the cake? I woke up later that day to find that a. the four-hour wait was caused by someone misplacing my sister's paperwork, so that by the time they saw her, any damage done by the glostick stuff if there had been any (thankfully, there wasn't) would have been irreversible and b. they didn't have any litmus paper to test the acidity/alkalinity of the glostick fluid in the first place.