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Intensive care: Patients' experiences

People's stories

Aged 31-40

Interview 06

Interview 06

Age at Interview: 35
Sex: Female
Background: Occupation: TV producer, on maternity leave at time of interview. Marital status: married. Number of children: 2. Ethnic background: White British.

Brief outline:Was admitted to intensive care in 2003 because of pneumonia, and developed septicaemia. Spent 3 weeks in ICU, 36 hours in a High Dependency Unit and 5 weeks on a general ward.

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She was anxious about moving to a general ward because she was too weak to do anything for herself and had no energy to press the buzzer.
Print So then I got moved down to the ward which was very scary because, as I say, when I was in intensive care I had somebody there all the time. And it might be that they wandered off for sort of twenty minutes and didn't wipe my mouth as often as I might've needed it but basically there was somebody there all the time. Whereas on the ward there wasn't. And I was very scared because I couldn't do anything to get anybody's attention. So you know I arrived and the sister, who was fantastic, kind of came and welcomed me and sort of set me all up and said, “This is your nurse and I'll be back tomorrow morning and this is how your bed works and here's the buzzer that you need to press if you need anybody.” And that was no good to me because my hands weren't strong enough to press it. And my arm wasn't strong enough to reach for it. So I felt really scared. It was like being kind of bound and gagged. I mean that was the main feature of when I was back on the normal ward. I was no longer seriously ill but I was seriously physically depleted, for want of a better way of putting it, by the experience. And it was like having a window into either being a small baby or being a very old person. And I was faced with challenges that, as an active, you know, working mother in their thirties you'd never imagine that you'd have to be faced with so, you know, not being able to walk, not being able to feed yourself. You know not being able to go to the toilet by which I mean, you know, not being able to stand up and physically kind of walk the sort of the five paces from the end of my bed to where the toilet was. Not being able to wash.

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