I suppose when they discovered that there were the collapsed vertebrae it would need treatment and they could give treatment, I did begin to wonder what the condition had to be for the doctors to pick this up earlier and get a referral to the hospital before it actually happened in my case.
How long were you going to the, to the GP complaining about back pains, before he referred you to the hospital?
It could have been over a comparatively short period perhaps two or three months but because he didn’t indicate that he considered it anything urgent the response from the hospital was that because the doctor hadn’t indicated that it was an urgent case they couldn’t fit me in for an MRI scan and it took several months before that happened.
It wasn’t until the November that I then got another call from the hospital to go back for an MRI scan. By that stage I was in a lot of difficulty getting in and out of bed was very difficult, my back was going into spasm, getting in and out of bed, getting up from a chair was just as difficult sometimes. And it was then that they realised that there was a more serious problem and the assessor sent my name to Mr [consultant’s name] for his assessment. And then from the MRI scan which I had, the collapsed vertebrae were diagnosed.
