Well that was Unpleasant.

And I'm Still Blaming The Tories.

It’s impossible to prove this theory but I reckon if I fell into a bucket of tits I’d come out sucking my thumb.

That’s how it feels anyway. My health since September last year has been exclusively bad. I was told, in a rather stressful way that comes with being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world, that I was prediabetic¹. Since then I’ve managed to eat better and a lot of people are saying things like, “Have you lost weight?” That should be good. But in October, while on annual leave, I fell ill with some coldy, fluey nonsense. Then in November I got some different coldy, fluey nonsense. In December, on another round of annual leave, I got a third bout of coldy, fluey nonsense. It was ironic I was falling so ill when my diet was arguably better than it’s ever been.

In February 2025 I finally had some more annual leave and felt certain things would go better. I booked a few days away in Manchester and got ready for some long overdue chilling.

On the day I arrived I tripped and while catching myself from falling I felt my back give way. It’s an old injury and I’m usually pretty good at managing it but something popped. I ended up spending the next three days in Manchester stuck in my hotel room, lying on the bed in agony.

I managed to get out to get medication, a back brace and Deep Heat but nothing worked. On the day I had to return I can’t tell you how I got from my hotel to the train station. I genuinely think I’ve blocked out the trauma.

What I didn’t know is this would be the best it would get for a while.

Trying to get off the train in Wolverhampton someone got annoyed I was taking a bit too long to depart so they barged past me, smacking me in the shoulder as they went by. It felt like shocks of electricity were shooting through my lower spine. I felt sick. As I got off the train² someone went speeding past me and I got another clump. At this point I was crying.

My wife collected me in the car and I got home.

Now this is not my first rodeo. This is an old back injury and I knew what I needed at this point was some stronger painkillers which would need to be prescribed by a doctor. This should be a fairly simple thing to sort out. Unfortunately people in the UK have spent 14 years voting Tory and public services have be cut to the bone, none more so than the NHS. To compound things, all the support services which eased pressure on the NHS have been wiped out. This is where the real nightmare begins.

I phone my GP. There are no appointments. I’m told to call 111³. They tell me call my GP. I explain I just have. They say I need to pop to the walk in centre. I explain I can’t move anymore and what I actually need is just a prescription. I’m told to call 999. This is the emergency number. I explain I don’t think it’s an emergency. I don’t need an ambulance. What I need is a doctor to prescribe me some strong painkillers. I’m told I have to call 999.

999 say I should call 111. I explain I have. 999 then say I should go to the walk in centre. I explain I can’t move. 999 explain I shouldn’t really have called them and promise to get a clinician to call me.

A clinician called me after an hour or so and said 111 should have dealt with this. They tell me they will contact the out of hours GP who will call me in an hour. This is about 6pm. This should eventually work out quite well. If I get a call soon there will be time to get to a chemist and get a prescription.

At 2am I’ve had no call and while trying to go to the toilet I fall on the floor screaming. My wife calls 999 again and we are put through to another clinician. This clinician says I have an appointment at the walk in centre for 4am. We explain no one has told us we have an appointment and it makes no difference anyway because I can’t move so can’t attend and this was explained in the first call hours ago. This clinician then gets quite annoyed (not with us, with the situation) he explains how 111 could have and should have easily dealt with this. He said he will call the out of hours doctor and get them to call me within the hour.

We do get a call from the out of hours doctor who agrees I need Naproxen and Lansoprazole. He writes a prescription then says, “I can send it electronically but you won’t be able to pick it up until chemists open at 9am.” My wife quickly pointed out that if he’d called us back before 8pm the night before like we’d been promised we could have got the painkillers then.

The clinician who sorted this took the time to call us at the end of his shift to check everything got sorted. We can’t thank him enough for that.

I started on the Lansoprazole and Naproxen and things went okay for a few days. I was in pain but it was easing and I even managed to start getting out and felt like I was healing.

Then the pain came back. Much worse than before. Much worse than I’ve ever known it. Nothing seemed to help. This was Friday 28th February so almost two weeks since the original injury. I called my GP. They had no appointments. They told me to go to a walk in centre. I said I couldn’t move. I said I hadn’t been able to move the week before but this was even worse. The pain was turned up to maximum. They said “You have to dial 999.”

I dialed 999. They said they would send an ambulance.

Now ambulances are rare in the UK at the moment. Due to all those Tory cuts Accident and Emergency departments are having to deal with people who are sick or injured who could be treated in the community. But all community care was cut by the Tories. So now those people end up in A and E. This fills the beds in A and E and when ambulances come in there are no beds. So ambulances end up parked up outside hospitals waiting for a bed. Then other people are dialing 999 for ambulance but they’re all parked outside hospitals.

Many years ago GPs used to do house visits. Imagine if a GP, or medical professional, could have just come out to me, or called me, or video called me. They may have been able to say what was wrong, prescribe something stronger and maybe arrange some care. But no, I’m another body waiting for an ambulance.

Now I have to say, the ambulance staff were amazing. I can’t praise them enough. They gave me gas and air, suggested I probably had nerve damage and when the gas and air failed they gave me morphine but said doing that would mean I’d need to go to hospital. We discussed it and saw no other way. They fitted a cannula, pumped me with morphine and we headed to the hospital.

Even on morphine the pain wasn’t going away.

We got to the hospital to find there were no beds so had to wait an hour or so in the ambulance. Eventually I got inside A and E and was in a cubicle. A lovely nurse called Rebecca turned up and we discussed what to do.

First up, a suppository⁴.

You need to realise I’m 52 years old. It was a matter of time before someone would have to stick a finger up my arse⁵ So, you know, it’s done now. It wasn’t too bad but then I was on morphine.

When the suppository didn’t work I think I was given codeine⁶. I’m also fairly certain I had some other painkillers as well but couldn’t tell you what. At least by now I was able to lie still and start sleeping. Something that had been impossible a few hours before but any movement was agony. I had weird morphine dreams which were spectacular and terrifying in equal measures. I was at one point examined by a doctor, given something else painkillery before finally getting transferred to a department called Ambulance Offloading.

What happened here is something I still struggle to recount. The anger, fear and anxiety I feel thinking about it is very real. A complaint has gone in. I don’t know if anything with change. I hope it will.

At about 2.30am I was “examined” by a “doctor”. I don’t know her name as she never introduced herself. What she did do was talk down to me as if I was crap on her crocs. This wasn’t an examination. It was, and I used this word deliberately, assault.

I appreciate if you have physio for a back injury it can hurt. I appreciate examinations can hurt. There was literally no need for what she did. It felt like she was punching my spine. At one point she pressed so hard on a vertebrae I could have swore she had pushed through the bone and was fingering my appendix. After this assault she said, “It’s muscular skeletal, you need to go home.”

Then she left.

I was crying from how she spoke to me. I was crying from what she said to me. I was crying from the pain. I said to a nurse on the ward that this doctor had been horrible. She said, “That’s the way she is.”

As if that’s an excuse.⁷

Because this doctor had said I had to go home the ward staff were then saying I had to go home. I explained I was in agony, especially after how I’d been treated. But they were insistent. They kept saying “the painkillers will kick in.” I said I’d had painkillers since 6pm the night before and asked when they’d kick in. They walked away.

They left me crying in agony.

I saw hospital staff walk past outside the room I was in. I had pressed the alarm button and no one came. I called out to staff for helped.

They walked past, ignoring me.

Now if you think that’s bad, it gets worse.

Way worse.

Eventually someone turned up and said no I had to leave. I’d called my wife by this point and begged her to get help. There was no one around to help her. I was told again I had to leave. I was still in agony.

It took 20 minutes to get me out of the bed and into a wheelchair.

I looked at one of the nurses and said, “Do you think I’m in a condition where I should be sent home?”

The nurse didn’t respond.

My wife pushed me towards the car. Even the small breaks in the vinyl on the floor were agony. Every position was agony. The best I could hope was to move, get a second or two of just a dull ache and then massive strikes of pain. I tried not moving, I tried moving. I tried numerous positions. Nothing worked.

Eventually, with all my spasms I fell out of the wheelchair.

This is when things got worse.

Way worse.

There is no way my wife could safely lift me into the wheelchair. I’m on the floor crying in agony and frustration. My wife is crying. We are both calling out to medical people for assistance.

Every single one ignores us.

Every.

Single.

One.

There was one beam of light when someone said they would get help. They never returned.

So yeah, every one single one ignored us.

Eventually three security guards appeared. It was them who helped me back into the wheelchair and to the car.

We need to now break down why this happened.

As I said, the NHS has been the victim of cuts and those cuts have knock on effects. But on top of that all services which help the NHS have been cut. Those needs haven’t gone away. It’s just pushed more work onto the NHS. I’ve mentioned cuts above, I’ve written about cuts before. After talking to a few people the issue is there are shysters who use the NHS when they shouldn’t really. Apparently, it’s actually quite common for people to lie on the floor pretending to scream in pain. As a result staff get desenitised to it. I wasn’t someone genuinely in pain who had been assaulted by a rude doctor. I was a shyster druggie layabout who just wants some free drugs.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the logic. I even understand why staff get desenitised to it. I’m just not sure I can justify the behaviour. If 99 people are shysters you still treat all 100 with respect because… it’s the 1 who is genuine. Now I don’t think 99% of people are shysters.

I worry how many genuine cases are being ignored because of the shysters.

Ultimately though, it’s still the cuts at fault. Services which could have helped vulnerable people in society don’t exist anymore. Chances to nip things in the bud, don’t exist anymore. As a result everyone is feeling more and more pressured.

As I got home I did get a bit of relief from the pain; so it took about 10 hours. Looking back I think if I hadn’t have been assaulted by that doctor, been given a little longer for the painkillers to kick in and treated with a bit more respect the experience could have been a lot better.

So I write this on the 23rd March. Over a month since the original injury. I’m still on Ibuprofen, still walking around with at least one stick and still using a back brace. I have good days and bad days. I can finally sit down and write something of this length and concentrate on it. But I’m nowhere near “fixed”. Physically, I think it’s at least two or three months before I’ll consider myself over this.

Mentally however, I fear the damage this has done. I know the pain I was in, I know I was crying and screaming, begging for medical staff to help. I know they walked past and ignored me. For whatever reason that was I feel, for the first time ever, that if I need help and dial 999 I won’t get it. I feel like the safety net has gone. It would be easy to blame the NHS staff for this. I don’t. We are all products of our environment and after 14 years of Tory rule, austerity and an obsession with privatisation it’s no surprise the NHS and the staff are damaged.

Just like when we’re healing we try to find the root cause to fix it. So I won’t blame the NHS. I’ll sit here, worried the slightest twist will bring back the pain and worried no one will be there to help and I will blame the root cause.

The Tories and their obsession with austerity.

Dave Pitt
23rd March 2025

1. My spell checker wanted to change this to “predictable”. Fuck you spell checker.

2. Don’t ask me how, I really don’t know.

3. This is a non-emergency number for the NHS so you can access out of hours services.

4. Haha… “first up”.

5. Which is my excuse whenever I’m caught practising.

6. I’m off my fucking box by this point.

7. After the complaint the hospital have said she was out of order and said she will undergo extra training.