We went to see the 24-hour GP, you know just thinking that she had some 24-hour thing or nothing too serious. And he diagnosed her with having an asthma attack. Which to be honest with you we thought was complete nonsense anyway. She's never had asthma before. And, we're not medical people but it just didn't feel right. Now I won't go into that bit too much because it's not relevant I guess. So we came back from that initial assessment. Coming back from [town] to our house, which is only a 20-minute drive, [my partner] had to stop to be sick. We then got back up here and she then started having more symptoms, coughing up blood, various things.
I'd already arranged a second appointment with our own GP, just to get a second opinion. But then it just got worse and so I called NHS Direct. NHS Direct were fantastic, surprisingly and fortunately, but they were absolutely fantastic. They listened, they understood the problems, they understood the symptoms and they basically said, “Right, we'll send an ambulance for [your partner] straight away.” I was a little bit, “No, I don't want to cause you any trouble. I'll drive [my partner] to the hospital.” They said, “No. We'll send an ambulance.” So they sent the ambulance remarkably quickly. The ambulance turned up within sort of 10 minutes of the call. And there were two ambulances. Again they were very, very good, very, very helpful and then took us down into A & E.
We met with a fantastic doctor there. The A & E consultant who, well various A & E consultants that looked after us, they had an idea of what was wrong with [my partner] but then they gave her a chest X-ray as well. And then she was diagnosed with pneumonia. Pneumonia at that stage, I think I related pneumonia to what most people relate pneumonia to. It was like something you get in winter, related to a cold, generally old people, but not necessarily too serious. In the background whilst all the to-ing and fro-ing was going on around A & E, both of us heard people outside sort of saying, “Have you seen these X-rays?” as if they were something, not the normal pneumonia X-rays, something a little bit more exciting in medical terms. And then, you know, eventually we found out that it was a bilateral pneumonia, quite severe. But even at that stage we sat and thought, I've gone back and looked at emails and text messages that I sent to various people around that time. It was like, “[My partner's] quite poorly. She's got pneumonia. She's going to be in hospital for a week, and will be off work for maybe two or three.” And then it sort of expanded from there really. |
