I had a phone called from the father-in-law wanting a lift to the hospital at short notice. He doesn't drive very far now and we discourage his driving when we can because his eyesight is not what it was anyway and obviously his reactions are not as razor sharp as they were. It meant taking him early the next day. OK! Plans immediately went on hold. We were planning and about to book a couple of days away at half term. Arrived at his house bright(?) and early to find him discussing hospital transport with a neighbour. His neighbour has had a heart attack and his wife is having health problems at the moment.
It seems very sad, in a way, that my life is increasingly becoming hospital centric at times and wifey keeps saying to me at the moment 'get it fixed' and I don't want another round of hospital visits.
Any way he explained that I could park about 5 miles from the hospital - for free! - and catch a free! bus to the hospital and the bus runs every 10 minutes. We catch this and I am impressed by Nottingham's approach to parking and traffic. The hospital is QMC but I have very little experience of this hospital, my experience being limited to the death of my father - so not a happy experience.
We arrive about 9:30 and immediately get lost! A League of Friends person sent us in the right direction, whereupon we got lost again and a nurse took us to the appropriate place. This is one of my first impressions of the hospital. We were not the only little lost patients - the hospital seemed to be crawling with them!
The two derby hospitals have different approaches to help patients.
(1) Both have far more signs telling you where to find X-Ray 92 or MAU or whatever.
(2) The City in derby has maps available and sent out labelling the campus in a fair amount of detail.
(3) The DRI has a single line painted throughout the hospital and each 'junction' is labelled 'Junction 1' or 'Junction 12' etc and your appointment card will say 'X-Ray 12 off Junction 17'. At Junction 17 the signage will be enough to help you find it.
(4) And when you get there there will be a BIG sign saying 'X-Ray 12 Reception'.
You can argue that these labels make it feel more like a hospital than QMC but duh isn't it a hospital? Isn't it supposed to be one of the leading hospitals in the UK?
Also there are far more signs in Derby telling you that the consultants on duty today are Dr ABC and Dr EFG and the sister in charge is Sister ZYX and the wait you can expect is R minutes.
All these things are missing and it does not make the QMC a pleasant place.
We finally left at about one fifteen after a feeling of having been forgotten, but have to go back next week - after we had planned to return from our few days away - but we go back with an expectation of one hour there.
Having returned home at about 2:30 I felt I could go to the gym and did so, but regretted it quite early on as on the mill my heart rate touched 170 and it didn't want to come down too easily. I ended up doing a measly 9 kph before giving up at 4k again. Things continued to go down hill in the gym and in part I wish I hadn't gone.
The day was crowned by a small success though with an Excel VB Script that worked pretty well first time out, and just needed a few cosmetic tweaks of extra spaces and spelling corrections.
Look for the positives! Now we can book our days away.
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