A Carer’s Diary – Episode 4

But few aspects of life are easy for someone like Harriet, already hamstrung with a million and one anxieties and fears even when in fine physical health.

She has huge problems getting to see her consultant psychiatrist, and she has just the same difficulties with a visit to her GP. Each autumn brings the dreaded flu jab announcements: Will All Those Suffering From Asthma Please Make An Appointment To See The Nurse. Harriet does suffer with asthma, but dreads having to get herself down to the surgery, to wait in the reception area, and finally, to have to make contact with the nurse.

In eight or nine years, she’s only once made it to the Flu Clinic. That year, that particular week, she happened to feel well, and – under heavy supervision – managed to haul herself down to the surgery.

Here, communication is the key, and the carer has a vital role to play. There is simply no way Harriet can have a ‘normal’ relationship with her GP, but each of us is keen to retain some sort of regular contact. We know it’s vital, just for the times – those times none of us can ever predict – when the GP might suddenly be required at very short notice. And those times do crop up, particularly when crisis strikes. Like the other Christmas, when her GP had to charge out to ‘give her something’, because none of us could stop her from trying to suffocate herself in a plastic decorator’s sheet. 

And so, I have become practiced in all forms of ‘back-channel’ communication with her GP. We exchange letters. She phones me up. I have attended appointments with her as Harriet’s proxy: sitting in her consulting room, literally receiving a ‘verbal physical’ on my wife’s behalf. It’s the only way we can do it.

It helps immeasurably, of course, when the GP is sweet and kind and limitlessly patient and accommodating. And thankfully, Harriet’s GP is all of these. On one occasion she did have to attend the surgery (for examination of a mole – no way that could be achieved by carer-proxy), and the doc offered to open up the back door of the medical centre so that Harriet could bypass reception and the waiting room entirely, and scuttle straight into her consulting room.

It is this sort of progressive, or in new-NHS speak, ‘joined-up’ approach, that can make such an enormous difference to mental health patients struggling to remain in touch with the GP system. I wish things had been so joined-up last Friday, when we had to attend the local hospital for her to undergo an ultrasound scan. The staff had no word of Harriet’s mental health history on their notes, and treated her so frostily and with so little sensitivity that she fled the consulting room half-dressed, sobbing and shaking, and never stopped running until she was out of the hospital altogether. A truly dreadful experience.

I realised too late, that I should have done more, in conjunction perhaps, with her GP, to forward details of her complicated medical history (in advance) to the hospital staff.
  “I wouldn’t have spoken to her like that, not if I’d known,” the nurse told me after, once I’d finished explaining to them just why Harriet had fled so abruptly. 

Of course, the nurse ought to have handled every patient with equal care and patience and sensitivity. That would happen in a perfect world full of perfect, unhuman humans. But above all, it reemphasised just how vital as much communication as possible is, when helping our loved ones navigate the various frightening passageways of the NHS. Help is out there and will be offered. The carer cannot afford to forget to communicate.