I’d never seen A&E like it when Dad was catheterised in a cupboard
My dad Colin was often high up on his doctors’ lists of priorities.
His health began to decline when a football accident in his twenties led to osteomyelitis – an infection in your bone marrow – in his left leg.
Some years later, he had a car accident – damaging the same leg again.
He endured decades of debilitating chronic pain, procedures, over 50 hospital stays around Essex and London and no fewer than 29 separate surgeries – including one to finally amputate below his left knee in 2013.
He took 25 tablets a day. He almost died of sepsis in hospital in November 2022.
By and large, he’d been treated with the utmost care throughout his 50 years with the NHS, so I didn’t expect him to die the way he did – without dignity.
The carnage at A&E on the afternoon of Monday 13 May was like nothing I’d ever seen.
That day, my 65-year-old dad was vomiting and suffering severe abdominal pain.
An ambulance and its fantastic staff attended my dad at home much quicker than we’d anticipated. It’s just as well, because the back of the ambulance was where he stayed for almost an hour after arriving at the hospital.
There were four or five other ambulances also stuck with patients outside that day, which was apparently ‘normal for Monday’.
A&E was beyond rammed. There were no available beds, not even any seats. The ambulance that had so promptly rescued my dad was now unable to leave to rescue someone else, because it was his only place to be kept.
Someone was eventually discharged, and we made it into the ambulance arrivals area, in a corridor, right by the entrance. It wasn’t a warm day.
What we saw there was like war.
It was reminiscent of the Covid wards we’d all seen on the news. Every square inch of floor, every patch of wall from floor to waist height was hospital beds. Bumper to bumper and foot to head with patients.
Nevertheless, an exhausted but cheery nurse came to take Dad’s blood pressure, and a doctor appeared after an hour or so. He was lifting Dad’s t-shirt and assessing his protruding belly and bladder within view of hundreds of people – my mum gave him a look.
‘There’s fluid,’ the doctor said. ‘We need to find somewhere private. We’ll find somewhere.’
In the absence of a single bay, a bed, a bit of corridor or stairwell, the doctor eventually found a store cupboard big enough to fit himself and my dad on the trolley. It was full of oxygen tanks – thankfully it had a working light.
My mum waited outside while my dad had a catheter fitted to drain the fluid. While the procedure took place, various staff wandered in and out, startled but seemingly not surprised at what they found. ‘Sorry, pardon me,’ was about as far as the pleasantries went.
Five hours later a cubicle was found for him. He stayed on his trolley that he’d first arrived on at 3pm on Monday, until well into Tuesday night when he was finally admitted to a ward.
There he was diagnosed with a blockage of the small intestine and an infection.
Dad received nothing for his pain and spent his final days in agony as the infection took over his body. Once the diagnosis of sepsis finally came on the Friday morning, he was unresponsive, and we gathered around him.
He died that afternoon in a four-bed bay on a ward with the curtains pulled around him. The private side room that was being prepared for him to die in still had an occupant.
Was the war zone to blame? My mum says no – the staff were so, so overworked and they weren’t coping. Despite losing her husband of 43 years, she couldn’t fault them.
The catheter, nor the cupboard, was to blame for his death. But could the infection have been caught quicker, before he became septic – had he not spent more than 24 hours on a trolley in an overcrowded A&E? Could he have been saved?
I suppose we’ll never know, but it seems likely.
Our family owes the NHS everything, not least 20 to 30 additional years of memories with Dad who would most definitely have died in the 90s, were it not for their intervention and free treatment.
He wasn’t catheterised in a cupboard because nobody cared. It happened because doctors cared so much that they did what needed to be done, no matter what. He was a patient and he needed help – and he got it.
But without proper funding, adequate facilities, appropriate staffing levels of well-treated employees, in five years’ time there won’t be anyone to help people like my dad.
Like a death from sepsis, there are stages of destruction, and if not caught and reversed, the point of no return approaches and death is inevitable.
The NHS stands on a knife-edge. They did their best to save my dad – I want to see it saved, too.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.