So I’m sat at home thinking I just can’t put another one of these tablets in my body, which I think are making me feel so ill. So as its Saturday I have to ring 111. I speak to an operator who always asks the same questions (over the years I’ve had many dealings with these) to check if you’re not having a heart attack. Because I tell her I’m waiting for a liver transplant she says she needs to get me to speak to one of the nurses who might know a bit more. She rings me back and you have to go all through the same stuff again. She says I need to speak to a doctor. So I wait and eventually she phones back. Answer all the same things again. Bear in mind that all this time I’m just feeling unwell and this is the last thing I want to be doing. She really wanted me to go to hospital because it could have been that my liver had just got worse. So I asked if I could try stopping the tablets and see how I felt. She said she would let me do that if I went to the Out of Hours Department, which they hold in the Horton Hospital in Banbury, so they could take my blood and she could wait for the results and see if there was any change in my liver function. So we agreed to do this.
When I get there she is the only medical person there so it will be her taking my blood so I wait my turn. At last I go in and she puts the rubber tourniquet so tightly round the top of my arm it is so extremely painful. She says can I bear it while she takes the blood so I try and think of something else. She gets the blood first time which is quite unusual cos my veins are tiny and when they put the needle in they sometimes disappear away from them. But anyway she got the blood. Soon as she took the needle out there was instant pain and a big lump just above where the needle had gone in. She said she must have just caught an artery and needed to compress my arm. This was horrendously painful, especially when she touched the lump, I nearly hit the ceiling! After a few minutes she found this massive bandage which she was going to have to use because she didn’t know where anything else was. This was wound round my arm so tightly it was extremely painful and uncomfortable.
I came out of there in tears. It was supposed to have been a routine blood test to see if I could stop the tablets and make me feel better and she had given and left me in extreme pain, and feeling terrible.
We left the hospital and Gary just went down to the car wash. I couldn’t bear the pain any longer I was going to have to take this bandage off. My fingers and hand were going blue, swollen, I got pins and needles and then couldn’t feel my fingers.
Luckily we hadn’t left Banbury so we went back to the hospital, waited again and I eventually got to show her my arm. She said ‘that’s not right’ And took the bandage off. What a relief! The lump had gone down a lot but my arm felt like it had been jumped on by two 20 stone rugby players. Didn’t feel too great for the rest of the evening but I think I had a better nights sleep than I have had for a while. What a day ðŸ˜
mylovelyliver 