Could be something you picked up as a youth. These micro organisms can survive for 5000 years.
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A friend fell 15ft off a ladder a couple of months ago. Heâs a big lad and he detached the ligament across his shoulder and lost the use of his arm.
Surgery a week ago and theyâve nailed him back together and done a â90% jobâ - apparently the alternative is a shoulder replacement, WTF even is that.
On top of that the more technically challenging bit was he bounced another tendon out of a groove in the bone and thatâs really tricky.
Anyway the point of this is the NHS. You get it.
Stitches out tomorrow.
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Lucky fella, all in
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My wife has had 2 replacement joints. Her joints are âreverseâ so the socket is at the top of the arm and the ball is fixed to the shoulder. We were told there are âoff the shelfâ joints available but SWMBO needed bespoke joints because of the state of her bones. The joints were made in Italy (world leaders in replacement joint manufacture - who knew?). We were shown similar joints which are fabulous bits of engineering. Physio went on for 1 year after each joint. This is transformational surgery and physio all performed by a brilliant team. All on the NHS. The surgeon told us the process of manufacture and how plastic similes are created of the joints, how he rehearses the operation using a plastic mock up of the anatomy (made from scans of the patientâs own anatomy using the plastic joints. The rehearsals are done on conference video calls with the engineers who make the joints and the plastic joint is tweaked and re-made and then another rehearsal is carried out until the surgeon and the engineers are satisfied that everything is good and then a titanium joint is made (3D titanium printing) and then a rehearsal is undertaken with the titanium joint and plastic anatomy and when everyone is satisfied all is good the actual op is carried out. So the surgeon has âoperatedâ on the patientâs âanatomyâ at least 3 or 4 times before he does it for real. Brilliant stuff really. And now apart from a few odd movements everything is back and the quality of life that these ops have restored is fabulous. The surgeon told us this operation wasnât available perhaps 10 or so years available.
I know it is easy to knock the NHS but stuff like this is wonderful. I am prepared to bet that when the NHS is fully privatised insurance companies will argue that patients donât need best quality joints made by best quality engineers nor surgery carried out by best quality surgeons so that the job is done properly because that costs money and cheaper alternatives are good for shareholders.
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Iâve always enjoyed the Americans against single payer healthcare argue that they mean there will be âdeath panelsâ deciding whether you get treatment or not, and cite the UK as an example of this. Ironically the American system has exactly these death panels and the UK does not, as we have NICE creating balanced policies for affordability versus health benefits.
Americans, stupid attitude to healthcare, who knew?
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Hopefully not by Lancia or Alfa as theyâd rust away at the first sign of rain
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Son and ex popped in Wednesday to drop water and cream crackers over. Looks they have both caught it now. 
Get better by next Friday!
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Hope so. Been sleeping upto 20 hours a day til yesterday.
Bored of cream crackers and water.
Was hoping to go to work Monday,but canât see it happening atm
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Are the cream crackers because theyâre the only thing that can fit under the door? 
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I remember when I was a student (late 70âs) the uni Engineering Dept getting a large state-of-the-art CNC milling machine (5-axis ?). I donât know the details but apparently it spent some of its time making titanium hip joints (maybe the dept sold the time to a commercial prosthesis company, or maybe someone had a research project on joint development ?). Anyway the machine was located behind a window so people could watch it at work. Over an hour or so it turned a plain titanium billet into a very precisely shaped hip part. Spellbinding back then.
I think both countries sit on a spectrum where at one end a patient can have any treatment they want and at the other theyâre lucky to be kept alive.
The American system can, in principle, deliver care at the very highest possible standard. But you will have to pay for it. Health âinsuranceâ is codified in precise black-and-white detail. The more extensive cover you want, the more it costs. Should you develop a condition which needs treatment what you will get will depend on whatâs in your policy. There wonât be much room for manoeuvre. Case in point: my (American) sister-in-lawâs mum was, towards the end of her life, in a facility which was struggling to meet her very demanding care needs. Her kids wanted her moved to somewhere better equipped/resourced and, of course, more expensive. Superficially the move was justified because she really was that ill. But an unseemly argument broke out with the insurer because they argued that mum herself was responsible for her deterioration, having promised to take medication which should have prevented it but then secretly not done so because she was unhappy about the medsâ side effects. Eventually, after a lot of pointing at the exact wording in the fine print, some compromise was reached. But that was how the process worked.
Here I feel Mr/Ms Average can get some very high-end treatment indeed. But they wonât always. Cases in point: the NHS would pay for âadequateâ replacement lenses when I got cataracts but not âfancyâ (my surgeonâs word) ones. When Claire needed targeted therapy for her cancer the NHS would pay for a very expensive drug. But when that stopped working the only remaining drug was so much more expensive that you couldnât have it unless you met a certain standard of wellness. They werenât prepared to spend the money unless there was a high, not just a âperhapsâ, chance you would really benefit from it. When my wrist was broken so badly that it needed surgery and metalwork I wanted the op done at my nearest hospital which is a designated âmajor traumaâ centre and has some very talented people. The NHS wanted to send me to a smaller place a 45 mile drive away because they had under-used capacity there. I had to consent to having the joint âfrozenâ if, when they got to work, the surgeons found that that was the best they could do. Iâd have been left with no up-down or rotary motion of the hand relative to the long bones of the lower arm. In the end the op was carried out in the major trauma centre. The surgical team told me beforehand that theyâd booked 1hr 20mins of theatre time but if all went well theyâd be done in an hour. In fact they worked for well over two hours but they did avoid having to freeze my wrist. Who knows whether the team in the smaller more distant place would have been capable of doing that ?
EDIT: If youâve got this far then apologies for the postâs late arrival. My browser fell over earlier this week and I thought the post was lost. Iâve just found that it wasnât.
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Maybe if they had frozen your wrist, you wouldnât have had that brain haemorrhage?
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Having worked in the NHS for the last 12 years it is infuriating to be constrained by Dickensian poor house attitudes towards budgets by top heavy admin bean counters. Letâs face it, you could throw all the money in the world at it and the NHS would absorb it all with consummate ease.
What the NHS is, is a socialist bubble within a capitalist sphere and this makes it utterly unique which brings utterly unique challenges.
It is absolutely right that a society takes its broken people and fixes them regardless of financial status. I could go on ad nauseam but wanted to keep this short.
On more than one occasion I have mentioned to moaning patients waiting rather impatiently that by all means they could go and live in another country and pay for their care. It soon shuts them up.
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Thatâs a neat observation 
although at the time of the haemorrhage the wrist in question was effectively frozen by the elbow-to-knuckles plaster cast it was in.
The actual reality was precisely the opposite. I got the high-end trauma surgeons because they piggy-backed the wrist op on the one to remove the drain tube from my skull (just one anaesthetic procedure and no risky trip miles away with a recent head injury). Fortunately the tube withdrawal and sewing-up went quicker than expected so the wrist overrun didnât disrupt the theatre list as badly as it might have done.
Just realised I wonât be able to eat anything at lopwell. Thatâs a disaster
Didnât you miss last year with Covid?
Year before
If youâve still got the shits on Tuesday nor will anyone else
Iâll bring you some takeaway pots,
Yes spoke to doctor about this yesterday as was hoping I could get back to work Monday