I finally got the ‘12 week’ text from GOV.UK today. Letter is in the post
I have been expecting it from day one and have been isolating for 3 weeks already.
Have I got 9 weeks left or 12?
Strange how this has panned out.
When I didn’t get the letter first time round the advice said that if you think you meet the criteria and haven’t got a letter by the 29th March then ring your doctor.
So I did. The surgery told me that they hadn’t been given the instructions on what to do.
I think that originally the letters went out based on data from hospitals and it has taken a while to get the info from GP records.
I assume, perhaps wrongly that you may have suffered hepatic hydrothorax, which effects the pleura and not the bronchial tree or alveoli and usually does not require ventilation but slow drainage of the pleura. Certainly sufficient if my assumption is correct to warrant icu. (calling on grey cells I’ve not used for years so guesstimate of condition probably wrong )
I guess there are lots of reasons why people might find themselves in ICU. I was once in there for five days with an infected femur. I wasn’t in there for the equipment available.
The other person in the same unit had fallen off Gordale Scar and was fucked, he was in a coma and plumbed into loads of stuff. The only similarity in our care was that we both had a nurse at our side constantly.
In New Zealand the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy have been declared key workers and households encouraged to “hide” pictures of Easter eggs in Windows so children can go on an Easter egg hunt on their daily walk.
She always seems to strike the right note just when it’s needed. Compare that to our fucking loons in charge.
(checked her account, she really did just write that… then again, she writes sickly-sweet fiction about nurses and - as Health Minister was COVID-19 Patient Zero at Westminster - so this kind of barefaced, insultingly-stupid crapola clearly comes naturally to her…!)
I posted elsewhere that Boris going into ICU had a nasty smell about it and was likely all part of Cummings’ political playbook - this sort of PR bullshit only increases that thought.
This, I actually cannot think of an expletive bad enough to describe Nadine Dorries but FUCKING CUNT will have to suffice, is, unfortunately, ‘my’ MP. I didn’t vote for her, the old and mentally inadequate of this parish did (and there is a fuck ton of the twats). She has zero interest in being a minister beyond the salary, expenses and backhanders it can provide her with, certainly any local issues are ignored from her country retreat in the cotswolds where she is self isolating with her 84 year old mother.
As for ‘clapping for Boris’, well the cunt and his ilk clapped when they defeated the nurse’s pay rise bill and he ignored all the advice to implement lockdown measures early so fuck him.
In further news my wife’s ward is being closed as a ‘green’ ward (basically low cv19 exposure as surgical patients only) so she’s going to be moved onto ‘red wards’ - still with zero PPE - promised Thursday - we’ll see. This still puts my fat, hypertensive, heart compromised ass at risk, as well as our kids, so one again fuck Boris, I’m rapidly losing even the baseline ‘human goodwill’ hope that he recovers, I don;t actively wish him ill but if he karks it I honestly don;t think I’ll feel one way or the other about it at present.
I’ve been thinking about this, there will be a quite staggering number of survivors suffering long term in terrible ways - we once had a talk from an ARDS survivor (mid-20’s when she was in ICU I think) at our research institute, and it was extremely harrowing- a long road to recovery with a lot of morbidity both physical and mental.
I remember it was the PTSD aspect that jumped out at me at the time- it’s one of these things that you can read about in scientific articles but makes much more of an impact when someone is relaying their personal experience
