On May 31st 2012 I had a tonsillectomy. The procedure went well yet I experienced several problems after such as infections and an episode of minor bleeding (spots or blood). I have experienced a LOT of pain in my life but for a while I had the worst pain I have ever known and I was unable to even swallow my own saliva. I was hospitalised on three occasions and hooked up to a drip and several antibiotics. It was depressing, every time I came home something would happen and I would end up back there again. My then boyfriend kept me going as he came to visit late evenings and like I have previously stated I was experiencing the buzz of the new relationship so the distraction proved to be every helpful. Still, I was physically drained and lost a lot of weight due to the stress and inability to eat. Finally I was discharged and things looked more positive, my Consultant advised that I should be ok to go on the holiday we had booked months ago as it was in this country and no flying was involved. I was apprehensive but didn't want to stop my parents having a holiday as I felt that they deserved a break after the past few weeks. We set off a few days after I was discharged and when we got there I felt quite relaxed because the cottage we stayed in has always felt like a second home to me. We had our dinner from the Fish and Chip shop around the corner and then settled in front of the TV for the evening. I tried to switch off but despite the cosy surroundings it was hard to. I remember going outside into the yard for some fresh air with my dog around 11pm and looking up at the sky. It had been a beautiful clear Summer's day and the navy blue sky hung above me like a huge sheet painted with a thousand stars. The stars twinkled silver in colour and the warm air blew my hair gently. I went inside and following my Consultant's advice whilst also trying to ease the pain, I gargled gently with salt water. When I spat it into the sink I noticed a small fleck of blood hit the stainless steel, the redness exaggerated against the pewter background. I tried not to panic as I told my parents and they tried to reassure me that it would be ok yet every few minutes I would keep spitting into a piece of tissue to check it had gone.
Everything seemed ok at bedtime apart from the panic simmering inside me like a caged animal trying to escape. I went into my room grabbed a book and settled into my cosy single bed with a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine and a lovely hot water bottle. I was just texting my friend when I felt my mouth fill with a warm liquid. I had to quickly spit it out onto my magazine of all places. When I saw what the liquid was my stomach did somersaults and the caged animal finally escaped. It was blood. Fresh, bright dripping blood, and it was a fifty pence sized blob. My legs couldn't carry me fast enough to the door and as my shaking hands threw the door open at top speed my voice yelled out 'Mum! call an ambulance, quick!'. Mum came rushing out of her room and She was shocked by the sight that met her as I showed her the a tissue full of blood. She shouted my Dad who stood there like a statue in pure disbelief. She switched on her mobile and after what seemed like forever the phone was ready to make calls and someone dialled 999. I remember calling my boyfriend who was visiting his parents at home in Cornwall. He answered wearily and I shouted 'I am bleeding, I am going to die', he didn't reply so I just hung up. I wondered if that would be the last call I ever made to him. I was in the bathroom with my head over the avocado porcelain sink. My mouth kept filling up with warm metallic tasting blood and I was desperately trying to keep from swallowing it. Every time I spat it into the sink I was shocked at the vibrancy of the blood. I struggle to remember the whole of the 999 call as I was concentrating on spitting it out. I can recall the phone operator telling Mum to keep me calm and make sure I didn't swallow too much blood as it would make me sick. I have a phobia of being sick so the thought filled me with dread plus I could visualise what the force of vomiting would do to the bleeding. I knew that if I was sick, I would die but not swallowing it was really difficult, I literally couldn't spit it out quick enough because it kept on like a torrent of scarlet water. It was relentless. I heard Mum shout 'just get an ambulance here. NOW!'. My Dad rushed to get dressed. I started to feel like I was choking, something was stuck in the back of my throat and no matter the risk I had to cough it up. I wretched and had to reach in with my fingers and pull out a mass of what I can only describe as body tissue. Sorry to be graphic but you know when you scrap out pumpkins at Halloween, well it looked like a chunk of bloody pumpkin with shredded tendrils hanging off it. I think they were massive clots of blood. Mum told me I mustn't cough like that but I had no choice because if I didn't I couldn't swallow or breathe properly. I remember her face, ghostly and ashen and her eyes, wide with fear . She was trying to keep me calm whilst shouting at the phone operator 'where are you? Where are you?'. Apparently there were delays due to 'a high number of incidents'. The blood kept on coming, the clots kept on forming. Mum kept the cold water tap running, kept washing the blood away so I didn't realise how much there was. My throat was so dry because I was trying not to swallow. I thought the ambulance would never arrive. Time ticked by, every second feeling like a minute. I felt like this was the place where I was going to die, in the middle of the night in a holiday cottage in a village I didn't live in.
We had nobody to run to for help. We had no landline. We didn't know where the nearest hospital was. I hadn't had the chance to say goodbye to anyone. My parents were going to go home without me, to an empty house that I would never see again. The bleeding was getting worse and my neck felt like it was going to break from bending it over so long, the pain was getting stronger in its intensity. I didn't want to die, I didn't want to die right now when I had been the happiest I had been for years but I knew if they didn't get here soon, I would. Time was running out. Mum was shouting at them to get here but it wasn't doing any good. I wondered what would happen if the phone reception disappeared as it often did in this village, or if Mum's battery ran out. My phone had little charge on it too. I could hear my own voice screaming 'help me, I am going to die!' over and over yet it felt like it wasn't me because I had retreated inside myself, becoming numb at the threat to my life. It was like an acceptance of my fate was starting to form. This was it.
Finally around 45 minutes after the bleeding begun a single paramedic arrived. He did nothing to reassure me, he was pretty blunt when Mum asked him what drugs he was putting into my system as he whacked a cannula into my arm 'A drip, ok?!', he snapped. He appeared to not know what to do, calling for back up and sitting there filling in forms and asking questions that he expected me to answer myself when I had blood spurting from my mouth. After what seemed like forever the ambulance finally came, what happened is a blur but they didn't do much to help me. I remember walking down the stairs as fast as I could manage through the weakness and them telling me 'slow down, you will pull out your drip'. Its bizarre but I remember looking at the pile on the slightly worn carpet, thinking I would never see it again. When I got into the courtyard I saw my parents faces illuminated by the street lights and the worry was painted under their eyes like charcoal on a white canvas. Again, I wondered if this would be the last time I would see them together .I thought about my beautiful little dog who was uncharacteristically quiet in the living room. I knew that he would never survive without me. He is my baby and I see myself as his Mummy, I don't care how silly that sounds to non pet owners, he is my world. The paramedic said my dad could follow in his car as he wasn't allowed in the ambulance but he had consumed three pints of bitter and was in no state to drive. They agreed that he could come. Mum would have to stay on her own having no clue what was going to happen to her daughter. She kissed my cheek and hugged me tight. We must have said 'I love you' fifteen times and I asked her to look after my dog and if anything happened to me to make sure he was ok. The doors closed and the journey to the hospital began.
We had no lights on the ambulance, it was a subcontracted ambulance. There was nothing that they could do to help me apart from to keep taking my blood pressure. I was given a bowl and it was rapidly filling up with the scarlet liquid and big clots. I looked like I was holding a bowl of body organs and my blood was foamy, mixed with saliva. I had to sit there staring at it which only confirmed in my mind how dangerous the situation was and made me wretch to be sick. 'Don't do that' said the paramedic. How on earth could I seriously stop myself when the clots were stuck in my throat, yet each time it made the blood flow quicker. He was filling in forms. I kept saying 'I am going to die' and he did nothing to console me, in fact he didn't even reply. Dad tried to keep me positive but as we drove down winding country roads time ticked by. It seemed to take forever. The paramedic said I needed to calm down because my blood pressure was showing I was at danger of cardiac arrest. I couldn't. I was petrified. On and on we went through the dark night, the bumps in the road shaking my bowl of blood until we eventually reached the hospital where the emergency department were awaiting my arrival. They rushed out to me looking anxious and I was wheeled inside. I don't want to go into details about the treatment but eventually they managed to stem the bleeding. It was painful and very distressing but I was thankful that I didn't have to go into surgery again. I had been so worried about that prospect especially as my Mum wasn't with me. I had very limited battery on my phone and had forgotten the charger which panicked me.My dad left at around 4am by taxi as I didn't like the thought of Mum being alone in the cottage. I spent about three nights in Norwich hospital and despite it being a really modern lovely hospital it was a lonely very miserable time being so far from my parents. They visited once a day and brought my doggy but couldn't come more often as it was a journey from the cottage. I was pretty weak and numb but I do remember saying to my Mum and Dad that 'I wish I had died' and my Dad crying at the words.
Mum told me that when we left in the ambulance she felt like she would never see me again. She said she 'acted like a zombie' and went around the cottage packing everything into suitcases. She cleaned the bathroom and broke down when she found one of my hairs in the plug hole. Mum vowed that if I was ok she would never moan at me about my long hairs getting everywhere ever again. She tried to stem panic about the fact that she was stranded in the cottage with nobody she knew around and erase the memories of what had just happened but she was filled with terror. She said the same as me, that she thought they would be returning home without me. She felt hopeless being so far away and not knowing what was going on and she even rang my brother at 4am because she was just desperate for someone to talk to, but of course he was asleep. It was Fathers Day and as she was packing the cases she found a card I had written for my Dad and broke down at the sight of it. I later learnt that my Dad read it and was in bits as the trauma finally hit him.
Three days later it was I was discharged. When my parents came to collect me to take me home part of me didn't want to leave the hospital. I was scared of it happening again and even though the doctors had said I would be safe I didn't trust them. I had been told it was safe to go on holiday before and look what had happened. The journey home was one of the most horrendous journeys I have ever had because I was in a panic the whole way. Every five minutes I would keep spitting into a tissue to check if there was blood. We got held up in traffic down a country road and I almost hyperventilated at one point because I was worried that if it happened again an ambulance would never reach me and I would die in the car in the middle of nowhere. It seemed like a lifetime, it seemed like it was a massive risk to drive home.
The incident that June had a massive impact on me. It worsened my depression and my existing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My Grandad fell over a month later and broke his hip. He was hospitalised for about six weeks and I couldn't bring myself to visit more than once because I couldn't bear the thought of going into a hospital and being surrounded by drips and medical devices. I attend hospital a lot due to my own health conditions but this was different because the ward was full of seriously ill people. We were very very close and I know that he would have been greatly helped by my visits. I will never forgive myself for that because he gave up fighting and he died two months after I myself nearly did. I feel I let him down. As I have previously mentioned I have flashbacks and vivid nightmares about the incident and get sudden feelings of doom. When I experience these lows I feel like something really bad is going to happen and nobody will come if I need help. I also get periods of what my counsellor described as 'disassociation' or emotional detachment, where I feel like I am not really here. It's hard to describe but I kind of feel like I am inside myself and that I am talking, laughing etc yet that person is not me and I am witnessing it from within. That my best way of explaining it. I can feel like I have no emotions, just numb, detached and look like down at my body and feel like it doesn't belong to me. Those kind of feelings are very scary, very confusing and interfere with my life and relationships. I also suffer with neck pain and stiffness due to the fact that my head was bent over a sink for two hours.
I contacted a solicitor because I wrote to the ambulance service to question why it took so long for them to reach me and they apologised but said that night was very busy for them. They said our 999 call was coded 'Red 2. Life threatening and requiring an eight minute response time'. Their reply claimed that the paramedic arrived at 00.35 which was 37 minutes after the original call and four and a half times over the required response time and that an ambulance arrived just after 00.45. I do question if this is accurate because both my parents and I think it was even longer, However, I definitely didn't get to the hospital until around 1.45 to 2am which meant I lost more blood than I should have and went through far more anxiety and panic than I should have done. They said 'regretfully, due to pressures outside our control and the location of the closet resource, an 8 minute response time was not achievable' and that they 'would also like to apologise on behalf of the Trust for failing to meet your expectations on this occasion'. I feel it is totally and utterly laughable that they think these words compensate me for the trauma we all went through. They said that because I didn't die they are not accountable for my distress. I didn't die but in a way a part of me did that night and they should be held accountable for the continuing effects on my mental and physical health that were caused by the significant delay. People that have been let down by this ambulance service not so long ago as me HAVE died and there is no excuse whatever for it. We need to fight for justice, to fight for a revision of the service and fight for change. Accurate ambulance response times are imperative and mistakes should not be brushed under the carpet. I for one do not accept an unemotional apology for what happened to me. It has taken me two years to feel like I can write this and I may pay for their mistakes for the rest of my life.
