To go back to the situation in the hospital. How was the communication between you and the doctors, or your Mum and the doctors?

Well great. I mean they could not have been more marvellous. There was a surgeon, who did the operation, and then there was the chemo guy. Then there was my Mother’s GP. And I just thought they were all fabulous.

Have you got any advice for health professionals?

No. I have pretty much just admiration for health professionals and particularly the National Health, because, as I recall I had screwed up and had not got my mother on private medicine by the time she got cancer. But my Father was, but my Mother for some reason I hadn’t done it, and, maybe because she was always so healthy, and so this whole thing was done largely on the National Health and I have massive admiration for the National Health.

So did she have a room of her own? Or was she in a ward?

She was in a room of her own. Did we pay? Did they offer her that? I think they offered her that. I can’t remember.

Sometimes National Health can offer people rooms.

Yes, I think they did, yes, I think they did. I think if they hadn’t I think we would have paid.

So the hospital environment was alright as far as you were concerned, the physical side of it?

Well yes, I don’t think the physical environment of a lot of hospitals is that fantastic, no-one would pretend they are. The big National Health hospitals in London, but the nurses were just unbelievable, fantastic.

Do you want to say a bit more about nursing care?

I don’t know much about nursing care except for what I saw, which was, I just thought these people are amazing. And, you know, they earn a pittance, and I always think, whether it’s the normal NHS nurses or whether it’s the Marie Curie nurses whose entire life is spent sitting in the dark with someone who’s dying, and you couldn’t really imagine a more gloomy job, and they earn almost nothing, is if I put them next to my hedge fund friends, I know who’s happier.

Can you say a little bit about the nursing care?

Second to none, absolutely second to none, and although I’ve had experience, experiences with different people in hospital and visiting them and things, but to be in that position myself, and just to acknowledge and realise the commitment and hours the doctors and nurses put through is unbelievable. There were some mornings I’d see a young doctor there and he’d be helping out every patient and at half past ten at night he’d still be doing the same thing only to return the same time in the morning and go through that procedure daily.

And to be fair, it shouldn’t be asked of them. They were always above and beyond the call of duty.

That’s good. How was communication between you and the doctors? Did you did, was there always good communication?

Yes, absolutely. They, I’ve always found that to communicate with your doctors or nurses or anybody in that position is to just speak to them as normal as anybody else and you get a better response but what I found was that on the daily rounds, for example, they never appeared to be annoyed or disappointed. They always had plenty of time for any questions that any of the patients asked, not just myself.

And then the physio come to see you and they start walking you and giving you exercises to do, which you can do while you’re in bed, to start strengthening up your pelvic muscles again. And your abdomen, it’s still very, very numb, and it is difficult. But it did help. And, and they were great. They were very understanding. But it took two physios to walk me, one either side, and I was very unsteady on my feet. And there was one occasion when I thought, I really thought I was going to fall and then they had to keep tight hold of me. But it did get easier, and day by day you could feel the difference.

What was the nursing care like?

It was, it was awful in actual fact. I mentioned to a nurse that sneezed three times while she was doing my dressing on my tummy, I said to her, You need to wash your hands And she didn’t answer she sort of went and done it, but she was carrying on doing my dressing. And I said to her, You need to wash your hand and I heard her say to another one, Oh we’ve got an awkward one here

To another nurse, you know, and I thought to myself, I’m not being awkward, I’m just statin, you know with all the kind of C-difficile and all the rest of it that they have these germs in hospital, and I’d just come from an operation, but she, I know that she was an agency nurse from somewhere or other, but I thought, Well that was wron, that she was saying that I’m awkward, and that, number one, or fussy, I think that was, that was the word she used. Or I think both. And then the next one she was absolutely, an absolute love. You know really, really nice, caring lady you know…

You said the nursing care was awful, was it awful in other respects too?

The nursing side of it was, it was just adequate. Okay some people were very good at what they’d done, others were just, not very good at what they done. I’m used to organising things in what I do, and if I run the business like the NHS run their hospitals I’d be, I wouldn’t have a business, to be absolutely honest with you.

But then some of, some of them worked very, very hard and were fantastic. And it doesn’t seem to be a you know you don’t get, the product changes because people are different. One person’s different from another, etc. But the whole thing seems to me to be quite chaotic, lack of, lack of the structure, lack of accountability to a certain extent, nobody looking after the standards of hygiene number one, over the top in some, in some ways, and waste of money and then in others, really, really lax.

Looking at the small details and filling in the forms, seemed to be too much of that. Not enough of people just walking round with their eyes open, blood on the wall, okay, there from the time that I arrived there, and tea spilt in the ward when I went to the recovery ward. There was, tea had been spilt on the floor, two days later okay, the tea stains are still there. Okay that means nobody had been in, they go around with a fluffy mop that moves the dust from one place to another, doesn’t do anything you know. You clean floors with water, a mop and that cleans floors. Moving dust from one place to another with one hand doesn’t, okay.

The cleaners had no direction. they’re not under the auspices of the nurses. The nurses should be telling them what they want done. They work for a separate company which are, which are franchised in, brought in by the NHS. And I just don’t think there’s enough control of how the place is cleaned, not at all.

How much were your problems medical problems during those early days?

I think a lot of them were medical. I saw the consultant every day, he would come round, but there didn’t seem to be a doctor who I could talk to about, you know. I saw him, he would come in the morning with the team, and then there was no houseman who I could talk to because she didn’t seem to be interested and didn’t talk to me. And it made me think a lot about what one needs after a big operation. And you actually need someone who is really interested in you medically and why you’re getting, I was getting very high fevers. And eventually it turned out I had a horrible infection in my abdomen and a whole lot of pus had collected which needed draining. And that is not that unusual with this operation, but somehow it took a long time to sort that out. And there was no one I could really talk to about it, who seemed to know what was going on.

Did this lead to a delay in recognising it?

I think it did lead to a delay in recognising it. And getting a scan done seemed to take longer than it should have done I felt. And draining it seemed to take longer than one wanted it to. And I mean eventually they drained off, a large amount of pus and put a drain in, and then they could find out which antibiotic I needed to be on. And then there was the whole question about whether the specimen had got to the lab. And I just felt no one was making, and that should have been the houseman s-, was making sure all those things happened. And I felt I had to keep asking. And I thought, Gosh, if I’m doing this and I know what should be done, what about someone who doesn’t know Now maybe I was irritating to them and therefore they had a rather bad reaction, but I felt some of that wasn’t as good as it should have been. And, you know, if you look at the scar and everything, that was obviously beautiful and the surgical side had been very, very good. But it was some of the medical input afterwards that I felt wasn’t there. Now whether that’s the way the new set-up is with doctors working shifts, the junior doctors working shifts, or whether it was a particular doctor, or whether it was that really there should be more collaboration between the medical team and the surgical team in the post-operative time.

You said at the time that you felt that you wanted an advocate. Who, who do you think this might have been realistically?

Well, I felt when I was a houseman one worked with a registrar to make sure you were the advocate of that patient and make sure that you knew and reported. And I felt that wasn’t there really. And if it’s not going to be the houseman, and they, you know, you never knew which one was going to come, but I had one who was particularly responsible, then who is there who look, who’s going to be an advocate? And one of, I mean in a way the nurses are a conduit. But they’re, they have a different function I feel and they’re not advocates in the same way, and it’s a different sort of knowledge which they have.

You said that in the hospital the nursing care was always very good.

Well not consistently.

Did she need a lot of nursing care?

In the last three weeks?

Mm.

She did. She needed, you know she was uncomfortable, and she needed people to sort of move and feed and adjust drips and that sort of thing. The medical care wasn’t always constantly good. And then I mean throughout the three years we had some appalling doctors and nurses involved.

Why were, in what sense were they appalling?

The generic thing would be their, their inability to deal with somebody as a person, to really understand, to be compassionate, to be thoughtful, to be caring, to treat somebody with dignity. At the worst there was one doctor who was simply incompetent. He was a junior; he was clearly not reading what needed to be done. You know by the time we were in year two, we knew more than they knew. And he wasn’t competent.

Can you tell me a bit more about the problem with the district nurses, without mentioning any names?

Well, we found that the trouble is with it is when you phone them up ideally you would phone them and then they would turn up within the hour, but that wasn’t happening, it was taking, you know, hours and hours for them to arrive and the pain was getting worse for me until it got intolerable. And then when I was getting the injection it wasn’t as effective because I’d had to wait so long. I mean the longest wait I had was six and a half hours and by then I was ready to climb the walls. It was just awful. But there was no way round it, you know, they couldn’t make a special case for me although I was prioritised, apparently, but somehow it never seemed to get through to the people at ground level, that I was a priority case.

And what were they like when they did turn up? Were they nice or

Oh, very nice. They were lovely ladies that did the injections, you know, very efficient, very kind, you know, couldn’t fault what they were doing. It was just the system that was in place, unfortunately.