1st Operation Cancelled..

I was told at my pre op assesment a couple of weeks ago that my operation could be cancelled due to the amount of flu going around but was assured id be called at the last minute if it was. It got to late last night and id heard nothing so was happy that it must still have been going ahead still. Just to make sure, i called the hospital this morning anyway and they said yes no problem its still happening. So i get all my bags ready etc, go to the hospital and check in at the Surgical Admissions Lounge. Im the second operation of the day so i think great, chances are theres beds free. I have another quick meeting with the Aneasthetic to check over everything and then get my wristbands etc from a nurse and sit back in the waiting room. Ive just bought a new book for my 10-14 days in hospital so i crack it out and whip through the first 50 or so pages. After just over 2 hours of waiting and reading i get called through and told that the operation has now been cancelled because theres no room on Intensive Care for me. The fact that there are ill people that deserve and need the bed more than me doesnt bother me at all, thats how things are and should be. I am however pissed off with the fact that iv wasted my entire morning just because some idiot couldnt ring the Intensive Care unit just to ask if there was any beds free. I now have to wait for another date to come through the post and have been told it could be atleast a month or two.. Great.. Guess i best put another order in to Coloplast for some more Ostomy Bags =(

Aww, I am sorry Steve - that happened to me once ... gowned up in theatre and cancelled minutes before I was due to go in - they hadn't any normal ward beds, never mind ITU. By this time my other half had gone to work in a different area of the country and I was stuck with no money or transport to get back home so insisted they provide me with some ... it cost the NHS £160 to taxi me back into another county as I wasn't a local patient - what made me mad was, it was the 'bed manger' that determined my clinical need and not my doctor, who had no control over the situation whatsoever.... grrrr!

Thank goodness you didn't have the flue at least or worse had to deal with some nonsense I had during one of my check ups leaving to go home.

I got pulled off an airplane after being told that morning everything was fine. However 6hours after my CT scan the radiology people called my doctor to have me come back in. So security at the airport had to get all my stuff off the plan and threw me on an ambulance that took me to the wrong hospital. Long story short. Four hours later they spend me back to the correct hospital to their ER. Then I'm dumped in the hallway to stay overnight because someone did not call upstairs to tell them that I was there. Which by the way they had a bed for me. So I stayed in the ER hallway over night then was dragged up stairs the next morning and like another four hours later they do a procedure with no anesthetization to put drain tubes in my abdomen. Yeah...they could have done it an hour after the CT scan result was done. Now that is a waste of a day.

At least you got to get some good reading out of it.