Chipped the car out of the ice at about half past seven on a crisp saturday morning and set off for the train to London. Knowing that the usually punctual and reliable (!) railway system occasionally has problems at the weekend, I caught an early train; if the NHS was going to be kind enough to see me on a saturday, I figured it would be rude to turn up late.
Minor glitch on the jounrney, but I arrived at UCLH in good time and, thanks to a very helpful security guard, found my way to Podium Level 2. Intriguingly, the "Podium" turned out to be what I would call an Atrium; perhaps someone made a mistake when the building was put up in 2005? At any rate, everything was clean and shiny, and the lifts worked.
Into a waiting room which contained: a reception desk, complete with receptionist, who booked me in with a smile; several vending machines in case anyone arrived with a coffee deficit; 28 chairs, neatly arranged and a vase containing some very fetching plastic tulips (they looked better than you are imagining). One thing missing. Come to think of it, there were quite a lot of things missing.......no-one else there. I was not used to such choice, so hesitated before choosing the chair that I judged would give me the best warning of anyone approaching.
Bang on 10, a young woman in green arrived and introduced herself as my radiographer before leading me off to the imaging department. I will not bore you with the details, but she was very efficient, quite chatty and obviously knew her stuff. Unlike Medway, when I asked about potential side effects of the two substances she would be administering, she was able to answer both accurately and with confidence.
Into the machine, and away it went.............30 minutes of the kind of percussion that I usually associate with raves (not that I have any direct experience of such things!). Job done, unhooked from the intravenous line, and off I went. By 10:50 I was back out on the street and heading for a quick bit of shopping before catching the train home.
If only this was the standard that the NHS could achieve across all its services..........but then UCLH is a well funded London teaching hospital. It is fairly easy to see where all the resources have gone; the power of the medical establishment, in its narrowest sense, remains pre-eminent.
Nothing much happening on the hospital front until 7th January now. Hopefully the Prof and I will be able to agree a treatment plan at that meeting and things will start moving. Only 5 months since the journey started................
No song tonight. In its place, I thought that those of you who have never experienced and MRI scan might enjoy a short clip of the sounds that the machine makes. This clip is very abbreviated as the scans last about half an hour. To get the most out of this, you need to listen to the whole clip through headphones with the volume turned up as loud as you can bear. The real thing peaks at 120db which is about the same as a jet aeroplane taking off......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4DHUim_Lc8
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